In her introduction to the 2006 edition of Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, Ariel Levy offered a brutal assessment of the book’s legacy. “With the possible exception of the Shakers,” she wrote, “it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism.” Porn had been brutalising and misogynistic in 1986; in 2006, it was worse and there was more of it. Antipornography feminism was vindicated, but for all the influence it had, it might as well have never happened.
I thought about Levy’s punchy phrase when I read the headlines last week about a “dramatic growth” in churchgoing among young people in the UK, mirroring the trend in the US. Twenty years ago, almost no one would have predicted such a revival. Religiosity in the West, and Christianity specifically, was in long-term decline; but more than that, irreligiosity appeared to be on an unstoppable path towards triumph.
Back in the 2000s, atheism felt exciting. It’s hard to credit now, but from 2005 to 2007, I spent many of my evenings in the pub thrashing out the flaws in agnosticism. No, no, someone would be saying as you arrived back from the bar clutching a round, it’s nonsense to reserve judgement on something when there’s no evidence for it. Someone else would quote Bertrand Russell, then the conversation would turn to the possibility of morality absent a deity: maybe atheists were more moral, because they weren’t just following old holy books? And then everyone could feel very pleased with themselves as they took a mouthful of their pint.
“From 2005 to 2007, I spent many of my evenings in the pub thrashing out the flaws in agnosticism.”
Unbelieving was a pleasant pace of rebellion for a young adult in England. We were defying our Church of England schooling, the compulsory “Our Fathers” in assembly, the nativity every Christmas. It was provocation without danger. The last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the UK had been in 1976. No one had been executed for heresy in this country for 300 years. The young apologetics fans who are rediscovering collective worship probably feel something of the same. There are many reasons someone can feel called to church, and one of them is surely the opportunity to make you elders feel slightly baffled and uncomfortable.
When it came to questions of belief, all the intellectual energy was with the “New Atheist” movement, which was determined to root faith itself out of public life. It felt like taking a stand against the atrocities of the time, which all seemed to have their roots in religion. The Catholic Church was embroiled in horrifying scandals of child abuse and cover-up, and the Anglicans had a few of their own. 9/11 had been a harrowing illustration of what “religious inspiration” in practice; the military response from the US and UK looked, to some, like a divinely motivated “crusade”. People who were unreasoning enough to believe in virgin births or paradise for martyrs were presumed to be capable of all kinds of unreasonable activity besides. Hence the title of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
But anyone who believed as fully as the New Atheists did that religion was a man-made phenomenon should have been able to foresee what happened next. New Atheism, it turned out, was not inherently immune to the unpleasant excesses of human behaviour: by 2011, a number of New Atheists, particularly female ones, had started to notice that their movement was every bit as man-heavy in its leadership as the Catholic church. It wasn’t even immune from acting like exactly the thing it set itself in opposition to — a religion. And like all nascent religions, it would undergo a schism.
The rupture in New Atheism should have happened sooner, given its awkward coalition of anti-Islam hawks like Sam Harris (who set himself against “the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living”), and anti-war liberals who got twitchy when Tony Blair said he would be judged by God for his decision to commit the UK to war in Iraq. Somehow, though, that shoe never dropped. Instead, the split in New Atheism started in an elevator.
In 2011, a New Atheist aligned blogger called Rebecca Watson (“Skepchick”) was propositioned in a lift at an atheist conference in Dublin. She posted about it, and received a comment from Richard Dawkins that began: “Dear Muslima…” The substance of his comment was that Watson’s experience was nothing in comparison to the suffering of Muslim women under theocratic regimes, and it implied that Watson should “grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.” Dawkins later apologised for invoking “rivalry in victimhood”, but by then, the New Atheists had already taken sides.
On one side of the aisle, the old school, who believed that social justice concerns were a distraction from the important work of cultivating unbelief. On the other, the progressives, who thought of atheism as a vehicle for all the other issues they cared about. But it was a clash born of the original mission of the New Atheists, who had wanted more than freedom not to believe; they had wanted to destroy religion as an institution, because they saw its influence as toxic. If atheism was toxic too, the progressives reasoned, it surely didn’t deserve to exist. As the blogger Jen McCreigh wrote: “I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.”
McCreigh proposed the name “Atheism Plus” for the movement she wanted to instigate. As another blogger explained it, this would be a movement that “explicitly focuses, not just on atheism, but on the intersections between atheism and racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social justice issues”. It was, in other words, an early instance of the omnicause. Very quickly, the issues of rationality and truth that had energised the early days of the New Atheists were left behind: facts might be important, but social justice mattered more.
Nowhere was this as obvious as in the way the former New Atheists dealt with trans issues. People who had once loved nothing more than dismantling the existence of the soul found themselves furiously defending the idea of “gender essences”. Rebecca Watson, the woman whose sexual harassment helped instigate the split in the first place, could recently be found “debunking” the Cass Review as “anti-science and anti-trans”. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its 1996 Humanist of the Year award from Dawkins for his sceptical comments about trans identity.
This was a bizarre turn of events, but maybe an inevitable one. The attraction of New Atheism had always been, partly, the thrill of belonging to the elect. Before Gary Wolf came up with the name that stuck, Dawkins and others had attempted to popularise the label “brights” for unbelievers. In an article in The Guardian, Dawkins wondered: “what’s the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?” And then he answered himself like this: “What would you suggest?” The implication was obvious. Religion was for the dim. Smart people were godless.
The Atheist Plus people thought they were better than the New Atheist people, but the New Atheists thought they were better than everybody else. The abortive effort to make “brights” happen suggests that New Atheism was always more about asserting one’s own superiority than it was about popularising reason: it was niche by design. In turn, the Atheist Plus people could prove their superiority to the New Atheists through their commitment to frankly improbable ideas. Declaring faith in gender identity was valuable in exactly the same way that believing in the literal truth of transubstantiation or the resurrection can be: an idea so unlikely that only special people could see its truth.
New Atheism was also, let us be honest, quite cringe. In many ways, it was exactly how you would imagine a religion of nerds to turn out. And, although there were many successful conferences and meet-ups built around it, it was fundamentally a very online movement. For an avowedly materialist philosophy, it offered very little in the way of real-world sustenance. I suspect that part of the resurgence of religion is down to simple skin hunger — the need of humans to be in physical contact with other humans.
It certainly hasn’t happened because religion has re-earned its moral authority. Despite the late Pope’s efforts, Catholicism still had plenty of sins to reckon with. The Anglican Communion has barely begun its own redemption — Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury over the church’s protection of the child abuser John Smyth came far too late and with far too little contrition. The lure of the pews comes from somewhere more elemental.
Christianity’s comeback with Gen Z is a backlash to the rationalist certainty in which the millennials steeped themselves, and which proved to be so limited when “rationalism” came into conflict with questions of identity. I don’t go to church and would be a hypocrite if I did (I don’t believe in God), but I do know that standing in a nave for a wedding or a funeral, elbow to elbow with a stranger, joining my voice with theirs, feels more sacred than sitting in a conference room watching a Powerpoint about why God doesn’t exist ever could.
New Atheism promised freedom from dogma so people could forge what Harris called a “religion of reason”; but that promise proved as tautological as it sounded. The collapse of New Atheism into a mirror image of its avowed enemy shows how very difficult it is to do without a god, even when you don’t believe in one. Most people do want some of the answers, rather than to be left to flounder for them alone.
