New Atheism

New Atheism had no founder, no organisation, no membership and no structure, and any account that supplies one is describing something that did not exist. It was a label applied to a run of bestselling books, coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in a magazine article in 2006, and it named a mood rather than a body.

The mood was this: that religion is not merely false but harmful; that treating religious claims with more deference than other claims is a category error; and that politeness on the subject had become a form of collusion. Earlier unbelief had generally been private, or philosophical, or content to leave the religious alone. This was not.

Four books did most of the work. Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 2004, written in direct response to the attacks of September 2001. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 2006. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006, the commercial peak. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 2007, subtitled with the claim that religion poisons everything. A filmed conversation among the four in 2007 was released as The Four Horsemen, and the name stuck to them.

The timing is not incidental, and the participants did not pretend otherwise. A movement arguing that religious belief has consequences found its audience in the years after religiously motivated mass murder, and during a period of religious mobilisation in American politics.

None of the four founded anything, and none of them asked to be grouped. The label was applied by a journalist and adopted by an audience, which is the ordinary way such currents get named.

The intellectual case was less unified than the label suggested. Dennett wrote about religion as a natural phenomenon to be explained by ordinary means; Dawkins argued that the existence of a god is a scientific hypothesis and a poor one; Harris argued that moral questions have factual answers; Hitchens made a historical and moral case and was, principally, a polemicist of extraordinary skill. They agreed on the conclusion and differed on nearly everything else.

The criticisms were correspondingly varied: that the theology being refuted was a version no serious theologian held; that treating religion as primarily a set of propositions missed most of what religion does; and that the argument shaded repeatedly into hostility towards Muslims specifically.

The fracture, when it came, was not about God. In 2011 the blogger Rebecca Watson described being propositioned in a hotel lift at a conference in Dublin, and asked men in the movement not to do that. The scale of the backlash, and a sarcastic public dismissal by Dawkins, exposed a fault line that had nothing to do with theism. Atheism Plus, in 2012, proposed that atheism be explicitly coupled with feminism and anti-racism, and provoked immediate hostility from those who held that atheism meant nothing beyond disbelief.

Atheism Plus itself faded quickly. The split it named did not, and it is the reason the movement is now discussed in the past tense.

Hitchens took no public position in that argument, and died in December of the year it began.

By the middle of the 2010s New Atheism had lost cohesion. Its audience dispersed in two directions: toward the social-justice politics that Atheism Plus had proposed, and toward the anti-progressive and contrarian commentary that later organised itself under other names. Several of its most prominent figures ended up on opposite sides of that division from one another.

Attrition did the rest. Hitchens, the movement's most effective public performer, died in 2011. Dennett died in 2024. Dawkins accumulated a long series of public controversies, had the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award revoked in April 2021 over statements on gender identity, and subsequently described himself as a cultural Christian, a phrase that would have been unimaginable from the author of The God Delusion in 2006.

The lasting effects are real, and are mostly not the ones the participants intended. Public disbelief became sayable: the taboo on stating plainly that one thinks religious claims false weakened substantially across the English-speaking world, and it has not been restored. The religiously unaffiliated grew markedly over the same period in North America and Europe, though the causes of that are demographic and social, and the books were at most a small contributor.

What did not happen was the disappearance of religion, which several of the movement's participants expected and predicted. Global religious affiliation has continued to grow in absolute terms. The claim that religion is false and the expectation that it is therefore going away turned out to be independent, and the second has not held up.