New Atheism and Me: Personal Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Movement
The mid to late 00s were the heyday of what was called “New Atheism,” a very loose intellectual movement of outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. I was a latecomer to the party, but I would eventually become an enthusiastic convert to New Atheism.
In the years since then, however, the movement has seemed to dissipate and, likewise, my own strident commitment to atheism has worn away. What happened?
In the summer of 2009, I had finished my undergraduate degree in history and was going to be starting my master’s degree in the fall at another university in the same city. That summer, I went on a few dates with a fellow student (although she studied science). While we were talking, the conversation turned to our favourite books. She mentioned that hers was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I knew that Dawkins was a famous atheist, but otherwise I didn’t know much else about him.
I told her that I wasn’t too religious, but that I definitely believed in God. I had been raised an Anglican and attended church regularly for about the first 13 years of my life. When I was a teenager, I stopped attending church, but it wasn’t because of any particular bad experiences, just that I didn’t want to go anymore. I still believed in Christianity and I certainly believed that God was real. Indeed, the thought of God not existing was frightening. How would we find meaning without God? Wouldn’t atheism mean the events in life were just random, without a greater purpose?
I really wanted there to be a God. For this reason, I thought it best not to look into atheism too closely. If I did, I had a lingering fear that everything I believed might come crashing down. In the back of my mind, I also worried about the possibility — a small one, but a possibility nonetheless — that God might punish me for even considering he didn’t exist! I comforted myself with the thought that there were probably good arguments in favour of the Christian position, even if I didn’t know them.
But, I liked this girl — although by that point things had already fizzled between us, or were soon to. I resolved that I would grasp the nettle and watch one of Dawkins’s many debates with a Christian on YouTube. Surely, I thought, the Christian would get the best of Dawkins and expose the folly of his arguments.
But I was disappointed pretty quickly. I don’t remember the exact argument made by the Christian, but it was something about how humans can be charitable in the face of tragedy. The debater mentioned a mass shooting and the grace that survivors showed afterward. Okay, I thought, that is moving, but it’s not a very convincing argument for God’s existence.
I felt a sense of cognitive dissonance as I watched the debate and as I thought about it more afterwards. On the one hand, I wanted there to be a God, but, on the other, the arguments against his existence seemed stronger. I wish I remembered more about my exact thoughts at the time, but I recall gradually thinking that if I was feeling such cognitive dissonance, maybe the best thing to do was to consider if atheism really was true. When I did this — tentatively — it didn’t feel so scary after all.
In hindsight, my earlier fears were not warranted. What gives life meaning if God isn’t there to supply it? The answer I came up with was that ultimately we make our own meaning: we decide what we live for, not anyone else. Of course, in difficult times, it would have been reassuring to believe that there was a plan for me and that things would work out okay in the end. But at the same time, if this were true, too many terrible things about the world would also need to be true. There were many people who suffered greatly and for whom things didn’t ever turn out okay: why didn’t God intervene to help them? What was his plan for them?
Having slowly shifted to atheism, I then began devouring as much atheist content as I could get my hands on, reading books and watching more YouTube debates with the so-called “Four Horsemen of Atheism”: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
At the time, it seemed like there was a political urgency to the arguments put forth by the New Atheists. By the time I became a fan, we were already into the Obama era, but the memory of the Bush administration and its Christian conservatism was still fresh. The arrogance and hypocrisy of this kind of Christian conservatism needed to be punctured. As Christopher Hitchens said following the death of one prominent conservative evangelical, Jerry Falwell: “if you gave him an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.” (He was completely full of shit, in other words.)
Similarly, the danger of Islamic terrorism had not faded. It had almost been a decade since 9/11, but the steady pace of terrorist attacks in Western countries meant that it was still a critical issue. As the New Atheists, particularly Sam Harris, had pointed out, these actions could not be explained purely or even mostly as the result of political or economic discontent, but that religious ideas were linked with actions. Bad ideas had the power to make good people do bad things.
In the immediate aftermath of my “deconversion,” like any other new religious convert, I was eager for others to hear the truth. I tried to engage religious friends or acquaintances in debate about religion, confident that I would show them the error of their ways and that they would soon come to think exactly as I did. In hindsight, I don’t think I ever convinced anyone and in some cases I probably went about it in an obnoxious way.
For me, I finished my master’s in 2010, and departed soon for South Korea to work as an English teacher for several years. While there, I sought out other atheists to connect with. One English-speaking group had a mix of Koreans and other ex-pats like me. I attended a few of the meet-ups over the course of my time in Seoul, but on the whole I wasn’t sure how fruitful the meetings actually were. We agreed on most things and some of the subjects of disagreement seemed trivial to me. But I did become friends with some of the people there, so perhaps that was the point?
In 2012, I attended a major atheist conference in Australia, since I was already in Korea and therefore the same hemisphere. This conference featured all of the major New Atheists, including Dawkins and Harris. (Hitchens was also slated to attend, but passed away several months before.) While there, I was admittedly somewhat disappointed. It was cool to see many speakers in person whom I had only seen on YouTube. At the same time, seeing person after person saying things everyone already agreed with got a bit boring. One thing that unsettled me was the uncritical applause following every agreeable statement that each speaker made.
Dawkins and the rest were treated as celebrities. There were probably a few thousand people at the conference and so the line to get books signed was quite long. (Of course, I waited in line too!) Any time one of the big names appeared in the foyer outside the conference theatre, a crowd of fans would soon encircle them. Outside the venue, various groups (Christian and Muslim) protested against the godless happenings inside as conference-goers egged them on. These confrontations might have been the most interesting part of the whole conference.
Around this same time, the New Atheist movement was fracturing. I remember I was in Korea reading about the “elevatorgate” controversy, which happened in mid 2011. The gist of the story was that a female secular blogger, Rebecca Watson, explained how at an atheist conference, attendees gathered late at night at the hotel bar. Afterward, she was riding the elevator with another attendee who proposed that she go back to his room for coffee to chat more, which she took as a euphemism for a sexual encounter. She rejected the offer and the guy went back to his room with nothing more happening. But later she made a video saying that guys should avoid doing this, namely, proposing a sexual encounter to a woman in an enclosed space in the middle of the night. Fair enough, but the video was widely debated, especially when Richard Dawkins intervened, writing an ironic letter to an oppressed Muslim woman, sarcastically noting that Watson clearly had it much worse than her. Dawkins’s point was essentially to say that compared with the concerns of women in oppressive countries, those of Watson were trivial. (Dawkins would, however, later apologize for his intervention.)
At the time, I thought this issue would blow over, but in fact it seemed to reveal a permanent division within the atheist community: on one side, were those who prioritized social justice issues, particularly with regard to gender and race, and on the other, were those for whom these issues were at best distractions from the more important task of fighting against religion. Of course, I had little experience in the movement then and perhaps had always assumed a greater unity within it than there ever was.
In the meantime, I had got accepted into the University of St Andrews (in Scotland) to do my PhD, and made my way there in 2013. Again, my atheism influenced my research topic. During my master’s, I had focused on the history of racism and one thing I noticed was that religion intersected with that history in a variety ways, from Biblical support for slavery, to the racist ideas one could supposedly draw from Charles Darwin’s “godless” theory of evolution. But what, I wondered, did historical atheists actually think about race and racism? As far as I could tell, there was nothing written about this topic, and so this is what I eventually would go on to do my PhD research about.
During my PhD, I was animated to some extent by the same sort of New Atheist feeling of injustice and mistreatment of atheists. This was reflected partly in how I framed my own research. Historians, I thought, had wrongly blamed the decline of Christianity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for opening the door to racism. I wanted to show that this was wrong — although the eventual argument I made in the revised book version (Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914) would wind up being more nuanced.
Likewise, at the time, I thought that the atheism in general was given short shrift by other historians. Very few historians seemed to be working in this area and I felt there was a need to create some kind of group to bring them together. With another Canadian historian who studied atheism, Elliot Hanowski, we founded the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism (or ISHASH for short) in late 2014. This, I hoped, would be an important online nexus for historians working in the field and perhaps would also boost the overall profile of this history. On the whole, the reaction from other historians was positive and we quickly gained dozens of members from across the globe. Two years later, in 2016, we held an inaugural conference for the society at historic Conway Hall in London, England, that brought together a number of historians of atheism and secularism from all over the world.
While in Scotland, as in Korea, I tried to reach out to some atheist groups. I briefly attended an atheist student group at St Andrews, but the society quickly fizzled due to lack of interest. However, another PhD student I knew from Glasgow University was involved with the newly formed Scottish Secular Society. The group mostly seemed to be about advocacy — they lobbied the government on various things, like opposing the teaching of creationism in schools — but there were also educational and social aspects as well. Like I would find with many of these groups, they struggled to identify precisely which of these to prioritize and it wasn’t clear to me whether pursuing all of these aims simultaneously was the best way to achieve things.
At some point along the way, my sharp edge of atheism began to dull. The issues of God’s existence and religion’s value seemed less pressing than they did several years before. By the mid 2010s, the threat of Islamic terrorism seemed to have diminished, while in its place the threat of white supremacist terror and the rising popularity of far-right political parties became more urgent. Evangelical Christian conservatism also seemed to have mutated from the previous decade under the Bush administration. During that time, their religious convictions, even if misguided, seemed to at least have some genuine depth. With Trump, someone who made barely a half-assed effort to appear to care about religion, evangelical Christians nonetheless appeared to have found their champion.
Listening to a recent podcast series called “Straight White American Jesus,” about white evangelicals and politics, I came to understand that white evangelicalism made more sense as a political identity than a religious one. In this way, when white evangelicals support Trump’s bigotry, nationalism, misogyny, endorsements of violence, and so on, they are not sacrificing their principles in exchange for, say, Supreme Court appointments: bigotry, white supremacy, and misogyny are also their principles!
In that sense, debunking the religious claims of white evangelicals seemed fairly pointless, since these claims were already paper thin even to the group professing them. It was now more urgent to fight against a harmful political ideology that used religion as a mask when convenient, than to fight against religion itself. With previous cases of Christian conservatism in the US, or Islamic fundamentalism, it did seem that the religious beliefs and principles were drivers of behaviour. With the current link between evangelicals and Trump, the religion seems more of a superficial marker of one’s tribe rather than an intrinsic motivating factor.
Aside from the shifting political context, my militant atheism was becoming dulled as I realized I no longer had the energy for anti-religious critiques. I agree with these critiques, and I think it’s still important for other people to continue to make the case against religion, but I don’t feel like I’m the one to do it anymore.
What is more, religion is clearly on the decline across much of the globe. In this way, New Atheism became somewhat of a victim of its own success, and it seemed to have begun fading away by the mid 2010s. People like Sam Harris are still active, and in his case more popular than ever, but they have pretty much said everything on religion that they’re going to say, and they’ve since moved on to other things. Likewise, the media seems to have lost interest in the grand debates between Christians (or other religionists) and atheists, like the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair in 2010.
There will always be a need to make the case against religion and to defend the freedom of and from religion. But I do wonder whether fighting about trivial church-state separation issues, like the ability to put “IM GOD” on a license plate, is the most important use of atheists’ time now, since our time and resources are ultimately finite. Are there not more important issues to fight for, and ones for which we can potentially fight side-by-side with religious people?
My atheist journey over the past decade has actually led me to a point where I don’t think about atheism much at all anymore. The question of God’s existence is no longer a really interesting one, even though I remain as much of an atheist as ever.
The militant New Atheist spirit seems to have petered out, in the wider culture and in me. But maybe this is a good thing. Social and intellectual movements should have the goal of making themselves obsolete. As societies become more and more secular, the need for atheist arguments naturally withers away. For me and for many others, the arguments against religion have basically been settled, but the question remains: what now?
