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With the death of the New Atheist industrial complex, a new variety of religion-friendly intellectual discourse has gradually taken its place in the public square. Jordan Peterson’s meteoric rise was the first and arguably most dramatic signal of this “vibe shift,” followed closely by the success of Tom Holland’s book Dominion in 2019. These and other public intellectuals have been helping to create what one might call a social permission structure for smart, areligious upper-middle-class Westerners to take Christianity seriously again.
Inspired by this trend, evangelical English broadcaster Justin Brierley wrote his buoyantly optimistic book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (2023), since developed into a successful long-form podcast. That book’s wordy subtitle, “Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again,” is the prompt that has in recent years launched a thousand think pieces attempting to distill this vibe shift into definite conclusions about What This All Means. Are we living through a great revival? Is the tide on Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith” coming back in?
In reading (and occasionally writing) these pieces, I have become sensitive to the risk of “vibe collapse.” The vibes, they are indeed a’changin, but are they all changing in precisely the same way, or the same direction? I propose that what some might vaguely identify as one single trend is more properly understood as two trends, related but distinct.
The first trend is represented by the aforementioned Peterson, Holland, and other elite voices like Douglas Murray and Bret Weinstein. All of these thinkers have made arguments that Christianity is an essential part of the West’s “source code,” that the New Atheists were mad to try to delete it, and that devoutly religious people are keeping our whole civilizational experiment from crashing down. Yet a personal Christian faith has remained elusive for them. Let us call them the Wistful Agnostics.
The second trend is represented by figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger, and religion historian Molly Worthen. Call them the True Believers: figures who spent years of their adult lives either indifferent or antagonistic to Christianity, then found themselves irresistibly drawn to it. Taken together, their testimonies make the most compelling case that we are living through more than a mere vibe shift. While they haven’t made all the same arguments or settled in the same denominations, they are united in their decision to make the stakes of that shift publicly personal. This defies the contemporary liberal fallacy of private religion, where one’s faith is treated as a matter with no substantive bearing on the public square.
Hirsi Ali’s story was initially misread as a mere cultural conversion testimony, but it soon emerged that her transformation was far more profound. Though shy to do intellectual battle on stage with her old friend Richard Dawkins, she articulated various ways that Christianity had presented itself to her as the best explanation for everything: It explained why there is something rather than nothing. It explained morality. It explained her deep yearning for a God-man like Jesus Christ.
Sanger’s and Worthen’s conversions were more academic, less buzzy. Yet they are noteworthy in that both thinkers systematically reexamined the post-Enlightenment presuppositions that have kept the West’s intellectual class in a kind of psychosomatic paralysis. Where Douglas Murray laments, in poetically doomed Victorian fashion, that “we can’t unlearn” those presuppositions, intellectuals like Sanger and Worthen have dared to ask, “Why not?” In impressive detail, they describe the arc of their own “unlearnings” across the realms of philosophy, science, and biblical criticism. They refuse to accept Stephen Jay Gould’s patronizing proposal that faith is acceptable so long as it is kept in its own magisterium, never to overlap with the magisterium of reason.
Louise Perry, another erstwhile Wistful Agnostic, is also skeptical that the magisteria don’t overlap. She began taking her children to church in the conviction that Christianity was, at the least, “sociologically true.” She knew there wasn’t a straight deductive line from sociological to supernatural truth, but she also knew that the former would be expected given the latter. From her study of the contrasts between a Christian sexual ethic and the ethic of the sexual revolution, like Hirsi Ali she began to reason backward, working out her own inference to the best explanation. In a new interview, she seems to drop an understated passing update that she has now crossed that line from Wistful Agnostic to True Believer.
If Perry’s arc bears a hopeful resemblance to Hirsi Ali’s, then Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, has shown recent signs of following academic converts like Sanger and Worthen. His new book Taking Religion Seriously is a short but dense work, racing through a cross-section of apologetic arguments. The second half even digs into the finer details of New Testament scholarship around the four Gospels, with Murray’s usual cheerful refusal to take “consensus” for granted. C. S. Lewis didn’t, after all, and Lewis strikes Murray as a very smart fellow. Murray’s wife doesn’t see the point of this intellectual exercise, but he can’t help himself. If nothing else, he’s just curious.
So far, Murray remains, in his own words, “pretty far from being bought in” on the Nicene Creed. He is still daunted by the cosmos-shattering, wondrous terror of Incarnation and Resurrection. Yet his book stands as a serious attempt to reject intellectual fence-sitting, to descend into the particulars and earnestly seek answers to John Betjeman’s insistent question: “And is it true? And is it true?”
A true turning of the tide will not be possible without that spirit of dogged persistence, that bullish refusal to cede the ground yesterday’s intellectuals so triumphantly claimed. It will not do to say that perhaps the New Atheists did win the argument, but it wasn’t all that interesting of an argument anyway. Their reasoning, traced all the way to its logical conclusions, yielded results no less absurd than the assertion that 2 + 2 = 5. There is nothing to stop anyone, expert or layman, from checking their work. There never was.
Image by Sailko, CC BY 3.0. Image cropped.
Bethel McGrew writes the newsletter Further Up.
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