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Did you hear? The New Atheism is defunct—and that must mean the time has come for a revival of Christianity!
Right?
Christian apologists are eager to argue this “if not A, therefore B” logic. Unfortunately for them, they’ve gotten out over their skis again. They’ve failed to recognize that they’re committing a massive fallacy of the excluded middle.
A classic example by Justin Brierly was published in Premier Christianity magazine, with a title that makes the logical leap obvious: “New atheism has collapsed. The tide is turning on belief in God“.
I knew something had changed when, in 2018, I received an unexpected email from atheist thinker Peter Boghossian. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.
At the time, Boghossian was a professor of philosophy at Portland State University. When he joined me for a podcast debate on faith in 2014, he had been as anti-religious as they come. His book A Manual For Creating Atheists (Pitchstone Publishing) was a set of strategies for talking religious people out of their beliefs, which he claimed were akin to a mental delusion.
However, four years later, when Boghossian responded to an invitation to a fresh dialogue, he told me that he was no longer participating in debates against Christians. Indeed, he now felt quite differently about people of faith: “You might be surprised at how much I have in common with you now”, he wrote.
…What had led to this dramatic change of tone? A few months later, it became clear.
Boghossian, along with two of his academic colleagues, were at the centre of a ruse, submitting hoax academic papers to peer-reviewed journals, in order to expose so-called “grievance studies”—critical theories in academia that placed gender, sexual identity and race at the centre of every subject.
The phenomenon that Brierly describes is real. However, the cause isn’t what he thinks.
What really happened is that the New Atheist movement, from the beginning, was hampered by an unrepresentative set of spokespeople—mostly male, mostly white, mostly elderly—and we’ve run into the limits of their progressivism. They were fine with questioning and critiquing religion, but they’ve proven unwilling to critique anything else.
READ: Skeptic magazine’s impotent attack on gender studies
Whether it’s feminism, transgender rights, identity politics, immigration, or war—as soon as the sword-point of skepticism was turned on one of their cherished assumptions, they became angry, hidebound cranks. They were only able to dish it out, never to take it. There was a time when they could claim to be on the vanguard of moral progress, but now it’s moved on and they’ve been left impotently sputtering in the rear view mirror. (Also, some of these figures—especially the “intellectual dark web” types—were never leaders of the secular community, except in their own minds.)
What comes after New Atheism
For these reasons, I’d agree that New Atheism, as a cultural force, is spent. But that doesn’t mean, as wishfully-thinking apologists assert, that Christianity is poised to come roaring back throughout the Western world.
On the contrary. As the one-time “thought leaders” fade further from relevance, a more enlightened, more diverse secular movement is quietly rising. Meanwhile, Christianity continues its slow, inexorable decline.
The Associated Press has a new report by Peter Smith that illustrates this trend: “America’s nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don’t like organized religion“.
The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it.
… The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” They’re the “spiritual but not religious,” and those who are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nones’ vast diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:
They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion.
As Smith’s story makes clear, nonbelievers are a diverse bunch—from “secular homeschoolers in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas” to “college students who found their childhood churches unpersuasive or unwelcoming”—who have little in common. They have their own ethical codes, their own spirituality, and their own ways of finding meaning in life. They’re mostly young, mostly politically liberal, but they come from all walks of life.
However, one trait they do share is a distaste for organized religion: its cruelty, its antiquated and dogmatic morality, its power-obsessed politics, its hypocrisy, its greed. Those flaws have long been evident to those who have eyes to see. And once you see them for what they are, there’s no going back. Nobody is changing their mind about religion because some old white conservative who wrote a book about atheism twenty years ago now supports Donald Trump’s border wall.
The nones are now 30% of the U.S. population, and among younger generations, it’s more than 40%. And this trend shows no signs of slowing down. It’s only gathering momentum, as every generation is more secular than its predecessors.
Under the radar
Importantly, it’s not just the United States where this trend is playing out. It’s happening all over the world, including former Catholic strongholds like Italy:
In Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, new research suggests that only 19% of citizens attend services at least weekly, while 31% never attend at all—and it’s a trend already growing in some European nations. They’re called the “nones” and are growing in numbers every day.
“Meet the ‘nones’: An ever increasing group across Europe with little to no religious affiliation.” Saskia O’Donoghue, AP, 8 October 2023.
It’s happening in Argentina, Pope Francis’ home country:
Most Latin Americans are Christian, and Catholicism remains the dominant religion; about two-thirds of Argentina’s 45 million people identify as Catholic. But the influence of the church has waned. There’s discontent following clergy sex abuse scandals and opposition to the church’s stances against abortion and LGBTQ rights.
… “The growth of those without a religion of belonging in the pope’s country is very striking,” said Hugo Rabbia, a political psychology professor at the National University of Cordoba.
He said the percentage of people who don’t identify with a religion in Argentina doubled within the last 15 years. That growth is in line with other parts of the world.
Christian apologists are celebrating prematurely because they’re confusing what gets reported on with what’s happening. They think of atheism in terms of famous individuals, and assume that what’s going on with them is reflective of the whole secular community.
But that’s not how it works. There’s no atheist pope whose decrees are binding on the rest of us.
The growth of the nonbelievers is gradual and statistical, and for that reason, it’s below the radar. But it’s proceeding regardless of figureheads who attract media attention by making inflammatory, controversial statements. Regardless of what some old sticks-in-the-mud are saying, congregations are still graying and dwindling, churches are still closing, and organized religion as a political force continues to lose power. The religious apologists who are prematurely celebrating the demise of atheism are going to be very surprised and disappointed.