Is the New Atheism old hat?

Spring reads 2/

Michael Pacher: The Devil Presenting St. Augustine with the Book of Vices

Over the break I want to leave the news schedule behind and run pieces on bigger themes. Today it is the rise and fall of radical atheism.

Nothing feels as alien as yesterday’s news. Twenty years ago, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins let rip with what commentators called the “new atheism.”

Their thoroughgoing denunciation of religion was, in fact, the rather old argument that there was no God, and we should grow up. Their critiques rode on the back of the al-Qaeda attacks on the West and the rise in political power of the American evangelical movement.

The new atheists were wildly popular, but also widely denounced. The right and the left hated them for similar reasons: they were attacking the tradition and culture of ordinary believers

Yet rather than feeling archaic today, the new atheism ought to feel relevant. It is not as if the power of militant faith has waned. In Iran and Afghanistan Islamist oppression flourishes. The conviction that God has blessed their causes drives the Israeli right and Hamas. And far from declining in influence, American Christians have succeeded in overturning constitutional rights to abortion.

I miss the uncompromising counter attacks of Christopher Hitchens and so many like him. We are in need of them.

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It’s not even 1pm on an autumn day in Soho, and my guest sits down at a table in the Gay Hussar, which at that time, in the early 2000s, was a safe space for politicians and political journalists to gossip, plot and booze.

“Would sir like a drink?” the waiter asked.

“Large whisky please, and I will be needing refills.”

Lunch with Christopher Hitchens was never a meal to be entered into lightly, and my memory of the occasion is a little fuzzy.

But I remember this: Hitchens had just met Andrew Adonis, a minister in the then Labour government and was furious. “He said he believed in religious schools,” Hitchens spat, his voice taut with incredulity.