Norman Levitt reviews John A. Paulos’s recent book, Irreligion:
An important question remains: Why has atheism and skepticism toward religion suddenly emerged as a question of great current interest, at least among the literate, in the past few years? Clearly something has happened to break atheists of their tendency to nurture their disbelief privately and to keep their opinions to themselves.
It seems obvious that politics has a lot to do with this, specifically the cultivation of the religious right as a phalanx of conservative storm troopers who are rewarded by conservative politicians by having their singular dogmas incorporated, as much as possible, into public policy. The increasing pressure on women’s reproductive rights, the suppression of stem cell research, and, most egregiously, the fresh intrusion of creationism into public schools are primary instances of this. Beyond these concrete horrors, there is no escaping the fact that the miasma of compulsory religiosity has thickened and diffused throughout society. For instance, one notes, rather queasily, the success of the Evangelicals in turning the Air Force Academy into a virtual fundamentalist seminary where cadets from all sorts of backgrounds are relentlessly pressured by officers and upperclassmen into declaring for the Born-Agains.
Atheists, who, despite polls, have never been all that rare, have come to mistrust the notion that they can believe as they will, undisturbed, provided they remain discreet about it. The mood fostered by the religious right seems to tend toward the inquisitorial. Scientists, in particular, representing the one vocation in which non-belief is the norm, rather than the outlier, have sensibly concluded that the culture in which they have quietly lived is being attacked at its foundations. It’s one thing to send your kids to a public school where “under god” is formulaically recited as part of the daily Pledge of Allegiance. It’s quite another to have your kid’s elementary biology class interrupted by harangues against “Darwinism”, or to see the Bible, taught as literal truth, surreptitiously introduced into the curriculum. When matters have come to that pass, scientists, among others, see little point in not fighting back openly. Thus one now sees a torrent of books, largely by scientists and sympathetic philosophers, striking back, not only at the enemies of stem-cell research and the proponents of Intelligent Design Theory, but at the very roots of the cultural tic that provides these miscreants such fertile ground: supernatural religion predicated upon a supreme being.
"Clearly something has happened to break atheists of their tendency to nurture their disbelief privately and to keep their opinions to themselves". Well yes it did – but it's not something Levitt mentions. While there's no doubt some truth in his citing of the usual Christian fundamentalist suspects, surely what happened was 9/11 and the rise of militant Islam.
In Europe at least – less so, admittedly, in the US – we thought we'd reached some kind of compromise with religion, whereby official nods were made in the direction of the church, and some bloke in a shiny cloak and funny hat would preside over the various ceremonies marking important points in our national lives, but really it meant as little as you wanted it to mean, which for most people was, not very much at all. Then suddenly we're jerked back hundreds of years, confronted with people prepared to murder, quite openly, in the name of religion. We have religious leaders proclaiming the joys of martyrdom, the desirability of killing non-believers. We have a religion which, seriously, teaches that the appropriate punishment for apostasy is death. We have the president of a theocracy, currently in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons, talking about the Hidden Imam, who manages all the affairs of the world. For us in the West the lunacies of organised religion have now stepped out of the history books and into the news.
I don't know the extent to which our recent confrontations with Islam have inspired each of the individual authors of the "new atheism". No doubt it varies: less so with Dawkins or Paulos, more with Hitchens. Generally, as with Norman Levitt here, the emphasis is on fundamentalist Christianity and the challenge to science in the rise of Intelligent Design or the threat to stem cell research. But surely militant Islam and our increased concern with its effects plays a major role in the atmosphere in which these books are received.
Mick Hartley 
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