Terry Eagleton's Unusual Challenge to the New Atheism

AMONG the public intellectuals of the Western world, a significant camp believes that only one really important battle of ideas is now in progress: between liberal, rational, law-bound modernity and the dark forces of Islamic jihadism. Most of the so-called "new atheists" have espoused that view in one form or another. Some, like the late Christopher Hitchens, have insisted that all religions have the propensity to darken the mind and encourage bad behaviour; others, like Sam Harris, have put particular stress on what they see as the capacity of Islam to inspire terrible misdeeds. Some, like the ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are prepared to accept a liberalised, anodyne version of Christianity as a foot-soldier in the modernist army; others are not. But they all see the battle over humanity's future in more-or-less binary terms. As a prediction of intellectual trends, and perhaps also of geopolitical ones, the title of a book published in 1995 seems quite prescient: Jihad versus McWorld.