The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise in the English-speaking world of the so-called New Atheists—strident thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris who saw religion not only as benighted and false, but as a source of evil. Although they had far fewer followers in the U.S. than in the UK, their American acolytes were often vocal and enthusiastic. Yet, their cultural cache and the popularity of their ideas has declined steeply over the past decade. Stefani McDade examines qualitative and quantitative data to detect the newer trends among nonbelievers:
In contrast to activist atheists, a more temperate type of atheist thinker seems to have emerged over the past five years or so, explains Jim Stump. Stump is vice president of programs for Biologos, a Christian think tank in the U.S. . . . Instead of frontal attacks on religion as a “cancer” to society, he says, this “new wave” is more subtle. Whereas New Atheists say religion is dangerous “and we need to go out and combat it,” Stump said, some of these dispassionate atheists simply dismiss religion as “irrelevant.”
“There’s kind of a second wave of books that are coming out by people who are atheists and have no love of religion—but their approach is different,” Stump said. The 2011 bestseller Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog, and many similar books offer naturalistic origin stories for humankind that account for the development of morality and religion. While these temperate atheist authors may still be “anti-religion,” they are more likely to acknowledge reasons why so many people today hold to religious worldviews.
Some of the best apologists for Christian humanism today aren’t even Christian. That’s because, along with the decline of “angry” activist atheists and the rise of “temperate” atheists has come the advent of what we might call “amicable” atheists. Most of them do not believe in God, but, unlike the temperate atheists, they are publicly pro-religion and may even advocate for Christianity’s benefits for society.
For instance, Jonathan Haidt, author of the best-selling book The Righteous Mind, is a moral psychologist who considers himself an atheist but believes religion is good for humankind. In an interview for the Atlantic in 2020, Haidt said he “believes that religion is part of human nature, is generally a good part of human nature, and an essential part of who we are and how we became a civilized species.” He also shares a critical commonality with Christians: believing there is a “God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart” that must be filled.
Read more on Christianity Today: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/september/new-atheism-is-dead.html