The sad decline of new atheism

While I was doomscrolling my way through Twitter one evening last month, the tweet below caught my attention: 

Whenever I see the name Richard Dawkins, I am taken back to the innocent days of the mid-2000s: the times before social media and fake news, financial crises and pandemics, when it seemed impossible that a man even more incoherent and ignorant than George W. Bush could one day sit in the White House; when China still seemed to be set on an inevitable course towards a more democratic and open future; when most Europeans were still excited about the Euro and European integration; and when "woke" was nothing but the past tense of "wake".

One of the intellectual currents of the day was the rise of the "new atheists". The term was coined in 2006 by American journalist Gary Wolf, to describe a new breed of intellectuals who felt that organized religion and irrational beliefs had no justification in the modern world, and that they should be aggressively criticised and countered in the public sphere through rational argument. That same year saw the publication of two of the seminal texts of this intellectual trend, "the God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. Daniel Dennett's more measured "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" also came out in 2006. In 2007, Christopher Hitchens produced a polemic entitled "God is not Great: why Religion Poisons Everything". That same year, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett met up in Washington DC, for a two-hour chat that later earned the four participants the jokey moniker of the "four horsemen of the non-apocalypse". 

For a while, the issue of "atheism vs. religion" became one of the dominant themes of intellectual discourse in the Western, English-speaking world. High-profile debates were organised between the two sides; book after book debated the issue; even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster became a cultural phenomenon. Richard Dawkins became the improbable star of the atheist movement, as he found himself invited to talk show after talk show on both sides of the Atlantic so he could espouse his materialist, and very English, worldview. Dawkins was also the star of the Global Atheist Convention that was held twice in Melbourne in 2010 and 2012 and, tellingly, never again.

Yes, because some time around the turn of the decade the whole question of atheism started to lose its urgency. This well-argued blog post presents some compelling evidence: Google searches for terms like "atheism", "atheist", "agnostic" and "creationism" started to decline after 2012, in some cases quite dramatically, as did traffic to some of the major atheist websites. It is a tendency that is obvious to anyone who follows such trends. It's not that religion has disappeared, or is close to disappearing, in the Western world; it's more that most believers and atheists have simply gone back to blissfully ignoring the other side's existence.

Why did this happen? One possibility is that the atheists, at some level, won the argument. The US has long been an outlier within the developed world because of the strength of popular religious feeling, with going to church the norm rather than the exception in many areas of the country. But over the last decade there has been a clear shift: the percentage of adults defining themselves as Christian dropped by 12%, to around two thirds, while the percentage of people defining themselves as atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular" rose by 17%, to around a quarter of the population (with other religions taking up the remainder). According to one study, the shift toward secularism clearly began to take place in 2007, the year after the God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation came out, when Dawkins and his fellow atheists were at the peak of their popularity. It isn't unreasonable to assume that those books, and the debate surrounding them, made being atheist or agnostic much less of a taboo for parts of the population, especially those who called themselves Christian more out of habit than because of any strong conviction.

If this is so then the "new atheist" intellectuals should be credited with a striking victory, something that generally gets lost in discussions about why their cause seems to have lost steam. But can this really be the only factor? Much of the American population is still religious after all, and the evangelicals are still a force to be reckoned with, so it's not like atheists have no one left to argue with. What's more Dawkins and Hitchens both came from Britain, a country where popular religiosity was not as strong as in the US to begin with, and where there has not been such an obvious move away from religion in recent years either.

Perhaps it is necessary to look at the even bigger picture. The world today is certainly a more troubled place than it was 15 years ago, and that's even without the Covid-19 pandemic. Authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia and populist politics have been on a steady rise everywhere for at least a decade, while the financial crisis of 2008 seriously dented the Western middle class's sense of security. Geopolitically, people's focus has shifted somewhat from the Middle East to Russia and China. Religious issues don't really have anything to do with the West's constant state of tension with China, a country ruled by a party that still officially bars its members from following any religious faith at all. Perhaps, in today's world, the truth or non-truth of religious tenets is just too abstract of an issue for people to care about? 

This might be a good argument, if it wasn't for the fact that many of the issues around which our current "culture wars" are centred, for instance the rights of transsexual people, are equally abstract to most of us. The intelligent, if America-centred, blog post to which I already linked above claims that the deciding factor was a shift in the progressive "hamartiology" (doctrine of sin). Over a decade ago, parts of liberal, Democrats-supporting America liked to define themselves as those who followed science and reason, and decided that society's problems were the result of people "blindly following three-thousand year old fairy tales". This was in keeping with the spirit of the times, since the evangelical vote had been instrumental in bringing G.W. Bush to power and things like Intelligent Design, radical Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were all over the news.  

In 2008 Obama gained the presidency, and then in 2014 the Ferguson riots happened, and the focus started to shift towards race. Especially after Trump was elected, progressive America decided to define itself in opposition to racism and sexism. The adversary was no longer those blinded by irrational, magical thinking, but rather those blinded by their own privilege, or unwilling to let go of it. Many atheist bloggers and activists turned into "social justice" bloggers and activists, while others shifted towards the alternative right. All of a sudden, arguing over the existence of god or whether we descend from apes felt very yesteryear.

It is certainly true that arguments over race, gender and sexuality seem to have superseded concerns over religion, not just in the US but all over the Western world. In the current climate it would certainly not pass unnoticed that the four stars of new atheism were all heterosexual white men; in fact, it seems incredible that this was hardly even remarked upon back in 2007. 

What is striking is that two of the main figureheads of the atheist movement, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have now become quite vocal adversaries of the new wave of left-wing identity politics. In the process, they have expressed support for some pretty unpleasant and reactionary causes and ideas. Over the last few years, Dawkins has gotten into all sorts of rows over his views on Islam, feminism and sexual harassment. Nowadays the Oxford biologist seems to spend more time rebutting accusations of racism and sexism than discussing religion or the origins of life. Most recently, the famous debating society of Trinity College Dublin rescinded an invitation for Richard Dawkins to speak because of "concerns" over his views on Islam and sexual assault.

Some of the accusations would seem to be well grounded. Back in 2011, Dawkins wrote an infamous letter entitled "Dear Muslima", in which he attacked atheist and feminist blogger Rebecca Watson for complaining about being propositioned by an unknown man in an elevator at 4 AM during an atheist convention in Dublin. Apparently the fact that Muslim women have much worse stuff to complain about means that Western feminists like Watson are whining about nothing. In the end, all that happened was that "a man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for a coffee". Never mind that the man was another delegate with whom Watson had never spoken, who thought it quite normal to invite her to his hotel room for "a cup of coffee" at 4 AM. Women in Saudi Arabia have it far worse, so what's the problem?

Dawkins later apologized for the letter, but in the meantime he has attracted more controversy with questionable tweets and remarks about how "date rape is bad; stranger rape at knifepoint is worse", how rape victims shouldn't be considered reliable witnesses if they were drinking at the time of the rape, and how the "mild paedophilia" he encountered as a schoolboy in the fifties cannot be judged by today's standards. Some of this could be blamed on the medium of communication: when you spend your days on Twitter, as Dawkins seems to do, you are likely to say a few idiotic things here and there. For a man in his seventies, getting the hang of the minefield that is social media must be tough. I also suspect that the sting of being called a misogynist has caused him to double down on these positions, rather than wisely steer clear of such topics. Still, while Dawkins did at one point claim to be a feminist, he has clearly decided that he has a strong antipathy towards "social justice" politics, "wokeism", "political correctness" or whatever else you decide to call it. 

Sam Harris has veered off into even darker directions. In 2017, Harris hosted the conservative writer Charles Murray on his podcast. Murray is famous (or infamous) for his view that different races display differences in average IQ that can only be explained by genetics, with blacks and Hispanics lower down the intelligence pole than whites and Asians. Murray was denied a platform and shouted down by students in Middlebury College, which convinced Harris that the writer was a victim of "liberal intolerance" and "political correctness gone mad" who deserved a platform. Most feel that during his podcast Harris did very little to challenge Murray and his toxic arguments, and generally seemed sympathetic towards him. Since then, Harris has loudly and repeatedly taken position against Black Lives Matter and "woke culture".

What of the other two champions of new atheism? Christopher Hitchens sadly died an untimely death from cancer in 2011, but one feels that if he were still around he would probably be as strong a critic of left-wing identity politics and "cancel culture" as anyone; as for Daniel Dennett, he was always the odd one out, being more of a scientist than a polemicist, and he usually avoids such topics.

Clockwise, from top right, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett

 

Perhaps it isn't surprising that there would eventually be a messy divorce between atheism and progressive politics. "New atheism" presented itself as a simple call to reject superstition and dogmatic faith in favour of rationality and evidence. But its proponents inevitably went beyond that, commenting on social and political issues in a way that was unsurprisingly affected by their personal origins and biases. Atheism's main public champions came from comfortable middle and upper-class backgrounds in the US and Britain, and they could be rather blind to the social and cultural dynamics which create religious feeling among the disenfranchised. What's more, while they were genuinely scathing of all monotheistic religions, their greatest scorn and condemnation was always reserved for Islam. 

Richard Dawkins was born into a family of the British landed gentry, and went to a renowned Church of England public school before moving on to Oxford University. While he abandoned Anglicanism as a teenager, he has never hidden a certain affection for the faith. He has called himself a "cultural Anglican", and praised the Church of England for its "gentle decency". He has also openly claimed that while Anglicanism may not be good, it's still better than Catholicism, Mormonism and Islam. He seems to have something of a blind spot regarding Anglicanism's own nasty history of discrimination and intolerance against Catholics, and, I suspect, the misdeeds of British imperialism as a whole.

Dawkins believes that organised religion is at the root of much of what is wrong in the world. As he claims in "the God Delusion": "Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpower Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it."

This is, of course, a highly simplistic worldview which dismisses all of the inequality, the historical injustice and the economic and social dynamics that lie at the basis of these problems. Dawkins also ignores the fact that in many parts of the world religious affiliation is basically a marker of your ethnic identity in the same way as your language or your surname, and has little to do with your actual beliefs. Still, one could argue that such simplifications are a necessary part of any sweeping argument about the world, and it is hard to deny that organised religion has been responsible for fanaticising and stultifying its followers, sowing division, promoting oppressive sexual and gender norms, and encouraging rejection of new scientific knowledge, including through the modern aberration of "creationism" that rightly outrages Dawkins. 

What many found troubling, right from the start, was Dawkins' very obvious aversion towards Islam. I happen to think Dawkins has a point when he says that you do not need to be a theologian to criticise religion or understand that religious beliefs are irrational and unproven, any more than you need to be a "fairyologist" to understand that fairies don't exist. For this reason I see no scandal in him condemning Islamic beliefs as irrational, in spite of not having read the Quran by his own admission. What I find more problematic, on the other hand, is when he veers off into geopolitics and blames the problems of the Muslim world entirely on religion, or talks about Muslim countries as if they were all no different from Saudi Arabia. His views on such issues are basically just the "common sense" of the Western establishment, and he has never had anything of particular insight to add to this debate.

Over the years, Dawkins' rhetoric on Islam has become more and more extreme. In 2017 he wrote: "It's tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it's a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they're not. If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it's quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam." In all fairness, he went on to say that he doesn't consider individual Muslims to be evil, and that he opposed Trump's Muslim travel ban. On another occasion he tweeted "(Justifiable) Islamophobia is poles apart from (bigoted) Muslimophobia. Muslims are Islam's main victims." He has repeated the old chestnut that Islam is not a race, so being opposed to Islam cannot possibly make one bigoted.

Sam Harris, the son of a Quaker actor and a Jewish screenwriter brought up by his secular Jewish mother in Los Angeles, also detests Islam. Even more than Dawkins, he has let his hatred of this religion lead him to take up some pretty questionable positions. In "Letter to a Christian Nation", Harris makes the reasonable point that most developed countries, and particularly Western European ones, are far less religious than the US and pretty much anywhere else on earth, and at the same time are among the healthiest, wealthiest, peaceful and most equal societies in the world. He then adds that "insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslims." Perhaps this might be because Muslim immigrants from France's former colonies in North Africa make up the bulk of the country's working poor and unemployed, rather than because being a Muslim or having a religion make one more likely to commit crimes, but such considerations don't enter the dangerously simplistic picture painted here.

Later on, Harris claims in alarm that "the birthrate among European Muslims is three times that of their non-Muslim neighbours. If current trends continue, France will be a majority-Muslim country in twenty-five years - and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow." A quick look at some actual statistics shows that this rhetoric has no basis in fact. In 2016, ten years after the book was published, Muslims in France were still only 8.8% of the population (the highest percentage anywhere in the EU), and projections on the share of Muslims in Europe in 2050 went from a low of 7% to a high of 14%, depending on levels of immigration. 

Finally, and most strikingly, Harris says that "Political correctness and fear of racism have made many Europeans reluctant to oppose the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst. With a few exceptions, the only public figures who have had the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European society seem to be fascists. This does not bode well for the future of civilization." The only thing left is for him to claim that Europe is about to turn into "Eurabia", a favourite term of far-right xenophobes.

I am certainly not blind to the reactionary, misogynist and intolerant aspect of Islam as it is practiced today by Islamic communities, or to the dangers of Islamism as a political project. No one should feel they have to hold back from criticising Islamic tenets because people might find it offensive, or for fear of being called prejudiced. No one should feel forced to repeat platitudes about it being a "religion of peace" either. But when Sam Harris describes Muslim immigrants in Europe as a threatening alien body, bound to take over the continent unless something is done, he really does sound like the worst kind of right-wing extremist. These arguments can only be described as deeply problematic, and yet they raised few eyebrows at the time.

Consider also that this was the time when the US army was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Harris expressed support for the invasion of Afghanistan, which he saw entirely as an issue of fighting Muslim fundamentalists who would understand no other argument. He opposed the war in Iraq, but without much conviction, calling it a "distraction" from the necessary war in Afghanistan. Richard Dawkins held exactly the same positions. Christopher Hitchens went further, strongly supporting the US invasions of both Iraq and of Afghanistan. His extremely strong antipathy towards Islam was certainly part of the reason he became such a fan of "liberal interventionism” in the last decade of his life. The sense of injustice that many people in the non-Western world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, feel over such military interventions was clearly lost on the prophets of atheism.

Dawkins with Ariane Sherine, launching the "atheist bus campaign" in 2008

In essence, new atheism was a product of its time, and it always had a conservative and Western-centric side to it. It has now lost the attention of the public, while some of its most famous faces are busy turning themselves into pariahs in progressive circles. And yet, while the contention that most of the world's problems derive from organised religion was clearly simplistic, the call to view the world through the lenses of rationality and scientific evidence hasn't lost any of its relevance. One need only look at the proliferation of idiotic and scientifically illiterate conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and vaccines, and the widespread distrust of medical science and faith in "alternative" treatments that laid the ground for them. Irrational beliefs continue to exist and thrive in the modern world, whether in the guise of holy books and revelations or of quantum healing and homeopathy.