A Polemical Turn Within Atheism

New Atheism names a polemical current that emerged in the mid-2000s, associated chiefly with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, distinguished from earlier forms of unbelief less by its arguments than by its tone and its target: the claim is not only that religious belief is false but that treating it with polite deference is itself harmful, and that religion should accordingly be criticised openly rather than granted the reticence more conventional secular liberalism had generally extended it. Dawkins's own The God Delusion, one of the movement's best known texts, argues the central case directly, that religious moderation provides unearned cultural cover for religious extremism by keeping faith itself broadly immune from the kind of sustained public criticism any other strongly held claim would face. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism situates New Atheism as a literary and media phenomenon rather than a membership organisation, with no shared creed, formal leadership or governing body, its coherence as a current resting on a shared publishing moment, several bestselling books appearing within a few years of one another, rather than on any institutional structure comparable to the organised humanist bodies it is sometimes grouped alongside.