The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode bestseller 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 further 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.
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