The New Atheists' Bad Apples
Several of the leading lights of the New Atheists were revealed to be bigoted and problematic, but this shouldn't invalidate the atheist movement, which is now more important than ever
“No, I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.” - George H. W. Bush, 1987
Over the last decade, the new atheist movement which emerged in the 2000s as a response to the religious right and Christian fundamentalist ascendancy in American politics has seen a backlash among many on the left, who see the corruption and fall from grace of its leadership as indicative of a distinctly illiberal streak among popular atheism itself. Some even go so far as to call the campaign a grift. From Salon:
New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.
Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it's not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and "skeptic" communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?
It is undeniably true that several of the well-known atheist leaders had unsavory opinions on a number of topics, and the article does a good job outlining the worst cases, but the conclusion that we can tar the atheist movement as a whole for the idiocy and prejudice of a few of its leaders doesn’t follow. We wouldn’t similarly take leftist Christians to task for failing to loudly and emphatically reject the inconsistencies of religious leadership in the US, and therein lies the problem: if an atheist can be held accountable for Richard Dawkins’ transphobic comments, despite possibly not even being aware of his existence, then the same purity could be demanded of any religionist when, for example, Pat Robertson says that Vladimir Putin was “compelled by God” to invade Ukraine in order to fulfill a Biblical prophecy:
The Christian media mogul returned to “The 700 Club” a few months after he retired from the show he hosted for 55 years on the Christian Broadcasting Network. In his return, Robertson claimed that Putin was simply following God’s wishes when Russia invaded Ukraine — to fulfill a biblical prophecy.
“I think you can say, well, Putin’s out of his mind. Yes, maybe so,” said Robertson, 91. “But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God. He went into the Ukraine, but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately.”
Would it be fair to ask all Christians why they tolerate such dangerous thinking in their ranks, even those who call themselves Christian socialists and would have nothing to do with Robertson? The umbrella term “Christian” is a loose enough association of individuals that one could argue the grouping is mostly meaningless, and atheism is even less cohesive: it isn’t a positive association of like-minded worshippers, but simply a categorization of those who reject the existence of God, and who tend to argue that such a rejection shouldn’t carry heavy social or legal disadvantages. An atheist who still supports Richard Dawkins is vulnerable to the same criticisms as a Christian who still supports Pat Robertson, but this is no more all atheists than it is all Christians. It is unfair to demand total ideological purity in one instance but not the other.
Every movement is vulnerable to some kind of leadership corruption, especially those formed under duress or in opposition to a hegemonic force (in this case, the ascendancy of the American religious right from the 1970s to the 2000s). Popular leftist groups as a whole tend to be plagued by infighting and charlatanism among their putative leaders, mainly because they’re predominantly underground movements without widespread popular support which are harassed, infiltrated, and brutalized by powers at be who rightly see them as a threat to their dominance. This does not discount the necessity of the movement, it only shows that suppression has the desired effect of derailing it, and a weakened, marginalized group of people will more easily fall prey to the exploitation and abuse of its more cynical leaders. The vulnerability of new atheism to such exploitation isn’t emblematic of atheism or rational skepticism, but rather of controversial and (fairly or unfairly) targeted historical campaigns. If a movement’s revolutionary spirit can’t be focused on actions against the oppressor (as is inevitably the case in American leftist campaigns), it will be focused inward; if the penalty for punching up is too great, adherents tend to punch inward or downward, as happened in the regrettable instances outlined in the above Salon article. In Harris’s case, for example, it was simply easier and more socially acceptable to single out Islam than to grapple with the appalling influence rightwing Christianity has on the government, and his criticisms of the religion regrettably veered into Islamophobia.
Mainstream right-wing Christianity isn’t as potent a force in US politics as it used to be, but its influences can still be felt in the recent spate of alarming anti-LGBTQ bills being passed, with ostensible goal of protecting children and fostering family values. The religious right is far from dead, and though the atheist movement helped to curb much of its influence over the last several decades, an open and emphatic rejection of religious intrusion into politics is just as relevant as ever.
I’ve been an outspoken atheist since around 2001 when I was in high school, but I haven’t heard of David Silverman, for example. Why should I have to seek him out and reject him, just because he calls himself an atheist as well? I never endorsed him, nor would I. I do not endorse Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, or anyone else simply because they share my lack of belief. Any atheist who does would find themselves very quickly at an impasse because atheists don’t agree on everything. What would such a person do if Dawkins argued one thing, and Harris the other? Thankfully this caricature isn’t real, though some leftists would have you believe it is representative of the movement.
Latching onto the problematic opinions of people like Dawkins and Harris and ascribing them to the ideology itself is a form of mischaracterization which would be met with immediate outcry by religious leftists if they were asked to answer for the actions of Jerry Falwell, Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, or Jim Bakker. The outcry surrounding their bigoted and Islamophobic opinions among those in the atheist community is in fact evidence that a movement based on rational skepticism is more able to repudiate inconsistency in its ranks. Compare the responses in either case: the religionist has no leg to stand on when debating Falwell, whose interpretation of scripture is no less valid just because it’s not as fashionable as it once was, whereas a real rational skeptic should be able to easily and soundly reject Islamophobia, transphobia, anti-woke ideology, and any other problematic position its own charlatans espouse (and most do), because those charlatans put forth an ostensibly scientific, reciprocal (i.e. based on common ground scientific argumentation) rationale for their position. It may be illogical and idiotic, but insofar as it isn’t based on mystical thinking, it can only be so problematic, because an atheist’s transphobia can be effectively argued against.
This criticism of the new atheists summarizes all of the religious right’s arguments, which amount to a retreat to moral and philosophical solipsism—they are unable to make their case in a rational way and so have to resort to alternative, mystical modes of thinking. Having ceded their position as the undeniable bearers of ultimate truth, the religious right resorts to underhanded political tactics (see for example Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power), direct appeals to populism (“This is one nation under God”), and offensive smears against opponents (accusing LGBTQ teachers of “grooming” children, for example). That some contemporary US leftists have internalized this framing is a disservice to the many victims of religious bigotry, and to criticize the atheist movement as being classist or problematic in some other way simply because religious worship is more common among the poor or because some of its leaders attempted to commodify it in exactly the same way as occurs in other groups is indicative of a widespread prejudice against atheists and the singling out of our imperfections over those of any other group. The rejection of god remains an important first step on the road to enlightenment, and it should be encouraged alongside the rejection and replacement of atheism’s troubling leaders in the service of building a better, explicitly socialist New Atheism movement which openly welcomes the marginalized and downtrodden and fights for their inclusion as we do for our own.