Breaking faith with unbelief

When the biggest names in “New Atheism” break ranks because one of its key institutions has become too intellectually cramped, it’s hard not to wonder whether the long-heralded secular utopia is fraying.

A few days after Christmas, Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Steven Pinker quit the Freedom From Religion Foundation in a dispute involving transgender identity. FFRF had published, then swiftly removed, Coyne’s piece defending “the biological definition of ‘woman.’” Dawkins labeled the takedown a panicked retreat from reality—“hysterical squeals,” he called it. Meanwhile, a few days before Christmas, in a long thread on the social media site X, celebrated British historian Niall Ferguson declared that he is now a “lapsed atheist.”

“No society has been successfully organized on the basis of atheism,” he told The Australian. “All attempts to do that have been catastrophic.” So, after a lifetime of unbelief, he and his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, were both baptized as Anglicans, along with their children. “We can’t be spiritually void,” Ferguson said, adding that we’re running “an experiment, without God and without religious observance—and it’s not going well.”

Both stories share a common thread: Secular ground is sinking sand. Dawkins’ crowd once promised that ditching religion would free humanity from superstition and bigotry but now finds itself caught in new forms of them. Ferguson sees our culture as starving for the transcendence the West seems to have tossed aside. Moments like these—fractures within organized unbelief and conversions of renowned skeptics—point to a growing openness to spiritual answers, argues Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist and author of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, due out this month (Zondervan, 240 pp.). He’s scheduled to appear on a future episode of WORLD’s daily podcast, The World and Everything in It, so I read the book—barely so, because to be honest, it’s not an easy read—and sent him some ­questions by email.

I asked Douthat to explain what accounts for the shifts away from atheist militancy to a more casual, if ignorant, secular stance. He took issue with my framing: “I’d say the secular culture’s attitude is increasingly curious about religion rather than just casual about it, especially if you extend the zone of curiosity to encompass spiritual and supernatural experience as well as specific religious teachings and beliefs.” But that said, Douthat explained that the secular version of America simply has failed to deliver on its promises of “sweet reason and scientific progress.” He also notes that younger generations have traded religious expectations for “rising anomie and anxiety and despair,” which makes atheism feel more like “a doorway into an even deeper pessimism.”

Douthat’s noticing a “lot more simple strangeness” creeping into the mainstream—from UFO talk to AI machine gods, which makes “the border between the material and the supernatural” feel far more porous. More people seem “open to the idea that there are more things in earth and heaven than can be accounted for in atheist-materialist philosophy.”

One of my favorite parts of the book: Douthat recalls a run-in with Christopher Hitchens—wielding a bottomless glass of scotch and a thesaurus’ worth of barbs—at a Christmas party, of all things. Hitchens challenged Douthat, “Suppose that Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead. Well, then what exactly would that really prove?” Douthat said he was unsatisfied with his response, admitting he was either too tired or tipsy to “do my part for the cause of Hitchens’ soul.” Of course, Paul the apostle told the Corinthians that the Christian faith hinged on that very question. Conceding it is conceding everything.

So how do you persuade someone who sees these indicators but still resists? Douthat argues that, even in a pluralistic world, the classic “memento mori” insight remains compelling—life is short, we all die, and if there’s a greater reality beyond us, it’s crucial to seek it. But modern religious diversity can tempt people to the Hitchens shrug—after all, how can anyone pick the right path among so many options? Still, Douthat insists, “the reasonable religious choice is not between a hundred thousand options but a small handful of traditions.” For Douthat, it’s Roman Catholicism, and he makes that case. It’s his book, so he gets to!

But I think we can see in both the atheist schisms and Ferguson’s faith signs of an unsettled moment—an era in which many are discovering that, as Douthat demonstrates in his helpful book, “removing God” doesn’t bring clarity or hope, but an emptiness waiting to be filled.