April 2009 – The mass transit committee of the city council in Ottawa, Canada, deadlocked in February over a controversy about God, highlighting a growing fracas between the forces of belief and unbelief.

In fact, there seems to be a growing and vociferous hostility on the part of many atheists toward Christianity in the U.S. and elsewhere, far beyond the normal gnashing of teeth that ramps up the fundraising for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

In response, some are saying atheism is dying in the West, and the growing stridency of disbelievers is the sign of a deepening frustration over the fact that most Americans simply refuse to “see the light” as they do.

Atheists fighting back
The hullabaloo north of the border was started by the Freethought Association of Canada, an atheist group that was willing to pay to run a simple sentiment on the sides of buses in that city. The message: “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The transit authority refused to run the ads, and the mass transit committee could not decide whether or not to overturn the ban.

The ad in Ottawa was similar to those paid for and placed on buses by various atheist and humanist groups in the U.S. and the U.K. Those efforts commenced during the Christmas season and were intended to run for another couple of months after the first of the year.

Observers say the public ads are indicative of a new and aggressive atheism that is no longer content to remain in the shadows. 

Whether it’s the vitriol unleashed against actor and writer Ben Stein for his documentary Expelled, or the latest attempts by atheist Michael Newdow to demand that the courts scrub away some particular public reference to God, atheists are fighting back.

Books written by atheist evangelists have sold millions of copies worldwide – most notably the 2006 trifecta of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett.

In their books these disbelievers sound as angry as any stereotypical fundamentalist Bible-thumper cooked up by Hollywood. Harris, for example, calls the raising of children in the Christian faith a “ludicrous obscenity,” and elsewhere impudently states that “if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath. …”

A dying star
According to Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford University and author of The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, the philosophical zenith of atheism was in the period leading up to the French Revolution in 1789.

The apostles of disbelief reigned supreme for the next 150 years, putting the church on the defensive ideologically like no other time save perhaps the first two centuries of Christianity’s existence.

This led to bold predictions of both the inevitable defeat of Christianity and the triumph of atheism.

In his book, What Americans Really Believe, Baylor University professor of the social sciences Rodney Stark quotes some of those forecasts. In 1878, for example, German scholar Max Muller asserted that “the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have at last been found out and exploded.”

The predictions, however, have not only failed to come to pass, but the reverse is true, insists McGrath. 

“The simple fact is that interest in religion has grown globally since the high-water mark of secularism in the 1970s, even in the heartlands of the West.” McGrath says, “Everywhere there are signs that atheism is losing its appeal,” circumstances that lead him to call the current era the twilight of atheism.

Once the brightest of lights in the skies of Western thought, atheism is now a dying star, unable to warm enough hearts to do anything more than pay for a few ads on the sides of buses.

Numbers don’t lie
This is not simple wishful thinking, but the reality for most of the West. Atheism claims only the smallest sliver of the public’s collective worldview.

For example, in 2007 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, interviewing more than 35,000 Americans about their religious beliefs and practices. Only 1.6% of respondents declared themselves to be atheists.

Other U.S. surveys show slightly higher numbers for atheism, but even in such instances, over a period of more than 60 years the percentage of Americans who declare themselves to be atheists has not grown one iota. It was 4% according to Gallup in 1944, and in 2007, according to the Baylor Survey, it was precisely the same – 4%.

While it is no doubt true that America is simply a more religious nation, in other advanced industrial countries atheism is still a distinct minority.

Stark points for proof to the numbers revealed in the World Values Surveys of 2001-2002. The percentage of respondents who said, “I am a convinced atheist,” did receive high numbers in countries like China (14%) and Japan (12%). However, out of the 33 nations surveyed, nine had percentages between 5% and 6% and 19 had percentages between 1% and 4%.

“By far the most interesting data in this [survey] are those for the former Soviet Bloc,” said Stark. After more than 70 years of enforced atheism, Russia’s score on the survey was 4%, “precisely the same as in the United States. Nor did the atheism campaign do significantly better anywhere in the rest of the old Soviet Bloc.” 

Still, millions of books bought by the fans of Harris, Dawkins and Dennett must mean something, right? Stark says, well, not really. “For one thing, 4% of the population of 300 million Americans amounts to more than 12 million people – a lot of them potential book buyers. For another thing, this 4% is greatly over-represented in the media, especially among book reviewers, and so the books received maximum coverage.”

In the end it was much ado about nothing.

Proof is in the pudding
Stark’s insight about the former Soviet Union’s failure to win the hearts of its own people – let alone make a compelling case for atheism to the rest of the world – may actually have revealed atheism’s Achilles heel.

For McGrath, the historical coup de grace for atheism was the real-life horrors of what such a belief system could – and did – actually unleash.

“Atheism invited humanity to imagine a world without God,” he says, but after the Russian Revolution, imagination was no longer required. “The Soviet Union presented precisely such an atheocracy. What humanity had previously been asked to imagine as presently unfulfilled had now come to pass. And the more people learned about the Soviet Union and its Eastern dependencies, the less they liked what they saw.”

The hypocrisy, brutality and simple ineptitude of Soviet communism gave many people a front-row seat to the failure of atheism. For those who had heard the wonders of atheism touted like a Broadway show, word-of-mouth made more and more people simply refuse to buy a ticket.

This might very well be the source of the frustration that many observers see in the newest brand of atheism. In an article noting the hostility of Sam Harris & Company, Michael Novak pointed out in First Things that “there is an odd defensiveness about all these books – as though they were a sign not of victory but of desperation.”

Host and parasite
After all, there is nothing very new about the arguments mustered against Christianity by Harris, whose tract is polemical but shallow. In fact, many of his contentions could easily be rebutted by a first-year Bible student.

So is it merely a case of sour grapes on the part of atheists, who have taken their best shot at winning the West, only to have failed miserably?

It is precisely at this point that McGrath is at his sharpest in The Twilight of Atheism. He warns the church in the West not to overlook one of the most salient facts about Christianity’s longtime foe: Atheism’s parasitical relationship with religion.

“In part,” McGrath says, “atheism gained its appeal in the past through the failures of the churches, rather than on account of its own intrinsic merits.”

When the church has been at its most corrupt, atheism has been at its most vibrant. In a rather bizarre sense, then, Christianity and atheism exist in an almost host-parasite relationship, with the latter feeding off the former rather than simply existing as a self-sustaining entity.

Historically, McGrath makes the argument that in the case of both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the church in both countries was seen not only as being itself a corrupt institution but also as being a support for an equally corrupt and brutal government.

This should serve as a warning for Christians today, McGrath insists. “It is easy to write off atheism as something that need no longer be taken with great seriousness,” he says. “But that would be a massive misjudgment. … [W]e must appreciate the deadly seriousness of the atheist critique of religion. … Atheism stands in permanent judgment over arrogant, complacent and superficial Christian churches and leaders.”

Christians should heed McGrath’s counsel if they are ever tempted to forsake their prophetic role in exchange for a permanent seat at the table of power. Should government become increasingly corrupt with the blessing of the church, it might re-strengthen what is now an atheism in its twilight years.

“The attractions of a world without God depend on whether the presence of God is seen as a positive matter,” says McGrath. “For this reason, the appeal and fortunes of atheism do not entirely lie within its own control. … Believers need to realize that, strange though it may seem, it is they who will have the greatest impact on atheism’s future.”   

Preparing a defense
Two excellent resources to help believers prepare a gentle and respectful (1 Peter 3:15) defense of the faith:

▶ The Reason for God: Belief in an age of Skepticism by Tim Keller www.timothykeller.com 
▶ Stand to Reason – An apologetics ministry that offers a wide range of resources including many online articles and a podcast. www.str.org