Lessons we can learn from the New Atheists

There was little that was new about the New Atheism – a post-9/11, anti-religious movement headed by Richard Dawkins and the like. Certainly the arguments had not progressed from those given by Bertrand Russell a century earlier.

In many ways, the arguments were worse. At least Russell was a philosopher. The New Atheism survived less on logic and more on vibes and vitriol. What was new was the sense of purpose, the moral crusade, the desire to save the world from the sorts of people who fly planes into buildings.

The God Delusion, Dawkins’ 2006 tirade, was the central text of the movement and it sold well over 3million copies. As with the New Atheism as a whole, its slogan was ‘reason’, but its style was ‘ranting’. ‘The God of the Old Testament’, wrote Dawkins early on, ‘is the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.’ Instantly you could see that this was not a rational argument about God’s existence. This was an emotional reaction to the Religious Studies O-Level which Dawkins just about remembered from his youth.

Terry Eagleton’s quip in the London Review of Books remains the best summary of The God Delusion: ‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’

Justin Brierley’s excellent new podcast, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God charts the rise and fall of the New Atheism. Fascinatingly, the prominent atheists he interviews agree with him that, whatever is the future of atheism, ‘the New Atheism’ has fallen. It’s now another fad we look back upon, like Nokia phones and Crazy Frog. At the time, though, there were moments when it felt powerful. They were ‘The Brights’ (an epithet which, ridiculously, they gave themselves), and it was a case of ‘out with the old religionists, in with the New Atheists’.

What can we learn, now that the movement is much more in the rear-view mirror? Let me point out two blessings that came with the rise of the New Atheism and two drawbacks.

Blessing one: unbelievers in large numbers wanted to talk about God. We could find in their evangelistic zeal a mirror for our own. They too wanted to convert people and so a certain brand of Christian (myself very much included) happily lost whole months of their lives in the comments section of anti-theist blogs. At least, though, we were having ‘God conversations’, or so we hoped.

Blessing two was related: Christians were forced to raise our game. Against a backdrop of Christian-Atheist debates, some Christian intellectuals came to the fore like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and Alister McGrath. They were given a much wider hearing and their own arguments strengthened multitudes of Christians listening in. But two drawbacks came in alongside.

Drawback One: the conversation was often Christ-less. Somehow the new atheists got away with painting everyone with the same brush, from Jihadists to Methodists. The problem was ‘fundamentalism’, apparently. Never mind the 19th-century Christian origins of the term. Never mind that extreme Quakers are a threat to nobody. But we allowed the conversation to be about ‘religion’ in general, and even the ‘God’ discourse routinely ignored the most crucial question: which God are we talking about?

Drawback Two: we treated the movement as though it was more representative than it was. It’s such a basic truth, but I should have reminded myself of it many times: not every non-Christian is a Richard Dawkins. In fact, very few are. Even among actual atheists (rather than the nominally religious, or agnostics, or common-or-garden ‘nones’), they tend to fall over themselves to say: ‘I’m an atheist, but not like Richard Dawkins.’ We are called to sow the seed of the gospel on every soil type, but I think we might have spent more time than was wise on the ‘soil type’ that was least open and least representative of the whole harvest field.

But we can learn from this. The movements that feel overpowering in their time are like waves crashing against a rock. So soon the tide recedes, the sea calms and the sun comes out. Or as Peter says, quoting Isaiah:

‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever’ (1 Peter 1:24-25).