Seen from a distance of nearly two decades, the New Atheism craze has finally begun to come into focus. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007), the revival’s canonical texts, exhibited an attitude of triumphal ignorance on the march. This attitude had less to do with the combatants’ arguments (polemical and frequently error-strewn) than with the knowledge that they had, even before they stepped onto the field, largely cleared it. September 11 and Islamist terrorism, on one hand, Bush-era Evangelicalism and the Iraq War, on the other: the New Atheists provided an intellectual-seeming costume in which to dress the existing prejudices of mid-2000s American elites.
With no particular fanfare, Americans moved on from the New Atheism in the 2010s. (The writer Scott Alexander suggests that the New Atheism was a “failed hamartiology,” and that the social function of “atheism” in the 2000s was taken over by opposition to “racism” and “sexism” a decade later, in the era of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and Donald Trump.) Its premier voices moved on, too: Dawkins to adherence to what he calls “cultural Christianity,” Harris to a career as a mindfulness guru, and Hitchens to his eternal reward.
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