Barbarism and Religion

The “New Atheists” of the early-21st century were, in this regard, not new at all. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali – above all, Richard Dawkins – evangelised for an atheism they saw as simultaneously irrefutable and in danger of imminent eclipse. Their struggle was not just for truth, but for survival. From the pages of Gibbon, an “age of darkness and confusion” beckoned. Science was a flame flickering in the shadows of history; they fought against the dying of the light. That these fighters should turn renegade – Hirsi’s apostasy from unbelief, Dawkins’s refashioning as a cultural Christian – seems, on the face of it, inexplicable.