Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?

The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered.

Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces made the time ripe for unbelief — because the early internet served as a novel transmission belt for skepticism, because Sept. 11 advertised the perils of religious fundamentalism, because the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis undermined the West’s strongest bastion of organized Christianity and because the digital-era retreat from authority and institutions hit religious institutions first.

The point of listing such forces is not to diminish the influence of Dawkins and the rest. By seizing their opportunity, the anti-God polemicists pushed secularization and de-Christianization farther than they might otherwise have gone. It’s just to emphasize that success in the battle of ideas is often about recognizing when the world is ready to go your way, when audiences are suddenly primed to give your ideas a fuller hearing than before.

Such an opportunity confronts religious writers today. The new-atheist idea that the weakening of organized religion would make the world more rational and less tribal feels much more absurd in 2024 than it did in 2006. Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays. The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off.

So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground — especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia — as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief.

It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for “cultural” Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.