New Atheism

What distinguished it

Atheism is not new. Philosophers have doubted the existence of gods since antiquity, and organized freethought movements have existed since at least the 18th century. What distinguished “New Atheism” — a label coined by journalist Gary Wolf in a 2006 Wiredmagazine article — was not the arguments themselves but the posture: aggressive, public, unapologetic, and explicitly hostile to the idea that religious beliefs deserve special protection from criticism.

The old atheism, broadly speaking, kept a polite distance. It was content to disbelieve privately, or to engage religion only in specialized philosophical contexts. The New Atheists rejected this bargain. They argued that religion — all religion — was not merely false but actively harmful, and that the social norm of treating religious claims as beyond critique was itself part of the problem. As Christopher Hitchensput it, the maxim “I respect your faith” was one he declined to observe. Respect had to be earned by argument, not granted by category.

The movement emerged in a specific historical context: the aftermath of September 11, 2001. When nineteen men flew planes into buildings in the name of God, a certain kind of liberal politeness about religion became harder to maintain. The New Atheists were among the first prominent voices to argue that the hijackers were not distorting their religion but expressing a coherent, if extreme, version of it — and that the proper response was not more interfaith dialogue but less deference to faith as such.

The Four Horsemen

The movement coalesced around four figures whose books, between 2004 and 2007, sold millions of copies and dominated public debate about religion:

Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, Oxford professor, and the movement’s most recognizable face. His 2006 book The God Delusionargued that the God hypothesis is a scientific claim that can and should be evaluated on evidential grounds — and that it fails those grounds badly. Dawkins also introduced the concept of the “meme” as a unit of cultural replication, which he applied to religious belief: faith spreads not because it is true but because it is good at spreading.

Christopher Hitchens — journalist, essayist, and the movement’s most gifted polemicist. His 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everythingmade the moral case against religion with a ferocity and elegance that no other New Atheist matched. Where Dawkins was scientific, Hitchens was literary; where Dawkins catalogued irrationality, Hitchens catalogued harm. His subtitle — “How Religion Poisons Everything” — was the movement’s most provocative thesis, and he defended it with chapter and verse.

Sam Harris — neuroscientist and philosopher, the youngest of the four and in some ways the most intellectually ambitious. His 2004 book The End of Faith— written immediately after September 11 — was the movement’s opening salvo. It argued that religious moderates, by providing cover for faith as a category, enabled religious extremism. His follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), was a short, pointed argument directed at American religious conservatives.

Daniel Dennett— philosopher at Tufts University and the most academically rigorous of the four. His 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenonproposed that religion should be studied scientifically — as a biological and cultural phenomenon with evolutionary origins — rather than treated as exempt from empirical investigation. Dennett was more cautious than the others in his conclusions and more interested in explanation than condemnation.

The four met for a filmed conversation in 2007, later released as “The Four Horsemen,” that remains one of the most substantive recorded discussions of religion, atheism, and the philosophy of mind. Hitchens died of esophageal cancer in 2011; the other three remain active.

The controversies

New Atheism attracted criticism from two directions: from religious believers, and from within secular and progressive circles. The internal critique was in some ways the more interesting.

Accusations of Islamophobia. Sam Harris in particular drew sustained criticism for what many saw as disproportionate focus on Islamcompared to other religions, and for statements about profiling that his critics argued crossed from religion-critique into ethnic and cultural prejudice. Harris defended himself on the grounds that he was criticizing doctrines, not people, and that the content of Islamic doctrine — particularly on apostasy, jihad, and the treatment of women — warranted especial concern. The debate was genuine and has not been fully resolved.

Reductive scientism.Critics argued that the New Atheists — particularly Dawkins and Harris — reduced all questions of value, meaning, and ethics to scientific questions in ways that were philosophically naive. The philosopher Terry Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, titled “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” became the most cited example of this critique: Eagleton argued that Dawkins was attacking a caricature of theology rather than its most sophisticated versions. Dawkins’s response — that sophisticated theology is still theology, and still without evidential foundation — was characteristic of the movement as a whole.

Arrogance and tone.Even sympathizers sometimes found the New Atheists abrasive. The historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the philosopher John Gray, and others argued that the movement’s contempt for religious believers was counterproductive and uncharitable — that it misunderstood what religion actually does in people’s lives and why it persists. The New Atheists were largely unmoved by this criticism, arguing that politeness had been tried and that religion’s political power in the early 21st century warranted direct confrontation.

The key texts

Beyond the Four Horsemen’s books, a few other works defined the movement’s reading list. Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis(2007) applied physics directly to the question of God’s existence. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel (2007) brought the specific experience of leaving Islam to a global audience. Michael Shermer’s work at Skepticmagazine provided the movement with a running critique of pseudoscience alongside religion. And the debates — particularly Hitchens and Dawkins debatingChristian apologists like William Lane Craig — became widely watched cultural events.

Legacy and decline

New Atheism as a distinct movement had largely dissipated by the mid-2010s. Several factors contributed. Hitchens’s death in 2011 removed its most charismatic voice. The remaining figures moved in different directions: Dawkins became increasingly focused on Twitter controversies; Harris developed his own podcast and intellectual brand focused on meditation, free will, and political commentary; Dennett continued his academic work with less public profile.

The political landscape also shifted. The early 2010s saw the rise of the “online atheist” community, which adopted the Four Horsemen’s combativeness without always their rigor, and which became increasingly entangled in culture-war controversies that had little to do with the original arguments about religion. The movement’s association with certain figures who held other controversial views became a liability.

But its legacy is real. The New Atheism demonstrably shifted the Overton window on public religious critique. It made it possible to argue in mainstream venues that religious belief was not just personally questionable but politically dangerous — and that the polite evasion of that question was itself a form of cowardice. The “nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — grew significantly through the period of the movement’s influence, and while causation is hard to establish, the correlation is suggestive.

Whatever its failures, New Atheism asked the right question: why should religious claims be exempt from the scrutiny we apply to every other kind of claim? That question has not gone away.