New Faitheism: All of the Sanctimony, None of the Conviction

Get in loser, we’re going to church.

Amid the post-pandemic backlash to cultural progressivism, the Anglophone world just can’t even with atheism anymore. Atheism—of both the old and ‘New’ varieties—is now cringe, blamed for enabling the rise of ‘wokeness’, implicated in the deterioration of social connections, and associated with insufferable neckbeards. The Great Awokening has purportedly given way to the next Great Awakening. Christianity is back, and religious revival is upon us. So, at least, we have been told.

Certainly, this is what a growing share of the public believes. Pew Research found that from 2024 to 2025, the percentage of Americans who said religion was ‘losing influence’ fell from 80% to 68% while the percentage who said religion was ‘gaining influence’ jumped from 18% to 31%—the highest figure in 15 years.

It’s easy to see why. Seemingly everywhere one looks, the press trumpets a return to religiosity while one famous atheist after another appears to recant or backpedal their nonbelief. Ayaan Hirsi Ali notably converted to Christianity in 2023. Her husband, the historian Niall Ferguson, similarly self-describes as a ‘lapsed atheist’ and a believing Christian. Joe Rogan now attends church and is ‘sticking with Jesus’ over the Big Bang Theory, while Elon Musk rates a cosmic ‘Creator’ as the person he most looks up to. Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian says she’s no longer an atheist and has moved closer to Christianity. Likewise, the self-described ‘reactionary feminist’ writer Louise Perry announced she had become a Christian in 2025. Author James Lindsay says he’s abandoned New Atheism and now takes the Bible seriously. The Australian commentator Josh Szeps said earlier this year that he ‘flipped from being an atheist to an agnostic’ upon seeing a volcano on Easter Island. Douglas Murray still doesn’t believe in God but now calls himself a Christian.

Even Richard Dawkins himself made headlines for identifying as a ‘cultural Christian’ on Easter Sunday in 2024—a statement that was predictably overblown by the religious; Dawkins himself later clarified that he still thought that Christianity is ‘nonsensical wishful thinking’ whose ‘founding myth’ is ‘deeply immoral’.

It might feel like we’re witnessing a sea change, but this ‘New Theism’ is not a true renaissance of faith. It is, like nearly every emergent trend in Western culture in recent years, performative, cynical, and thoroughly postmodern. And that’s just as well. The antidote to the malaise of our time is not the embrace of ‘tradition’ or the jettisoning of rationalism. New Atheism might have fallen out of vogue with culture writers, tastemakers, public intellectuals, and the influencer class, but it was never the cause of what ails modern society. As we blunder through the morass of post-truth, conspiracism, and illiberalism, what we need now most of all is more reason, not less. In fact, it’s high time New Atheism—or something a helluva lot like it—made a comeback.

The first aspect worth clarifying is that the trends being represented as a religious revival are not what they appear. The vibes have indeed shifted, but that’s mostly all they are—vibes. Gallup polls show that American religious service attendance continues to decline alongside the percentage of adults who rate religion as important in their lives. Pew likewise finds an ongoing decrease in daily prayer, Christian identification, and overall religiosity while atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow. Much has been made in the media, especially conservative and ‘anti-woke’ media, about a resurgence of pro-religious views and churchgoing, but this shift appears to be concentrated predominantly among young men in particular—and Gen Z remains the least religious generation in the history of American opinion polling. The only broad evidence I could find for an uptick in faith was in the General Social Survey, but the shift from 2021 to 2024 was so small it falls within the margin of error.

What we’re seeing is a rise, not in faith, but in faitheism, what the late Daniel Dennett called ‘belief in belief’. We see a dip in critical anti-religious views and a jump in commentary extolling the sociocultural utility of religion. But hardly any of these New Atheists turned faitheists or atheists turned ‘agnostics’ have actually begun believing in the existence of God, much less become practising religious congregants. Nietzsche wrote of the ‘will to power’, but there is no similar ‘will to magic’. Sceptics can become believers, of course—usually over time, or, more rarely, after some kind of personal experience they interpret as powerful evidence—but no one can simply will themselves to actually believe that 2+2=5 in a given moment if they don’t already believe it. What people can do is notice which way the winds are blowing and make strategic marketing decisions. It’s remarkable how many anti-woke atheist public figures suddenly warm to Christianity just as the political culture is shifting rightward and rendering their personas in need of a rebrand. The old saying that ‘There are no atheists in a foxhole’ has never quite been right. The more accurate version is ‘There are no politically “heterodox” atheists in a vibe shift.’

And so we’re now awash in commentary about how religion is a primary source of meaning and purpose and that the decline of faith is eroding the fabric of society. But much of this commentary seems to divorce the social and psychological benefits of religion from actual religious practice and faith, as though a nonbeliever can just call themselves a cultural Christian and watch their life improve. Except, the data unambiguously show that nominal identification with a religious tradition, absent regular congregational practice and actual conviction, confers no benefits at all. In surveys about happiness, life satisfaction, and social connectedness, culturally religious people score the lowest of any group, including atheists and the religiously unaffiliated.

We are told by postliberals and their ‘politically homeless’ fellow travellers that secularism has failed us, overlooking the gargantuan advances in human flourishing the secular West has seen in the past several centuries. And we are treated to endless think pieces about the profundity of religious life penned by authors often no more religious than any atheist and whose prose, like a 17th-century French nobleman, is heavily perfumed with flowery language to mask the stench of their unbathed vacuousness.

Indeed, as fashionable as religious cosplay has become, we hear very little in the way of religious apologetics or evangelism from cultural elites. Christianity is proffered as a lifestyle aesthetic, a life hack, and an unironic opiate of the masses by a class of influential poseurs who don’t believe the central truth claims of the faith, make no attempt to save anyone’s soul, and appear utterly unconcerned with truth as a concept. Religion, in this postmodern view, simply works. Who knows why, who cares if it’s true, and besides, it seems like the diametric opposite of whatever zany stuff they’re doing on the far left, so it must be a good counterweight, right?

This deeply ties into the cultural shift over the past decade away from sincerity and earnestness and toward a kind of transactional relativism where truth doesn’t exist, and only whinging midwits pretend otherwise. This, perhaps above all else, was the cardinal sin of the New Atheists: they cared too much about what is true, when any properly jaded intellectual sophisticate knows there’s no such thing. Among elite circles especially, there is nothing cringier and more embarrassing than being earnest, and where one is earnest, they must disguise it in a mask of blasé cynicism to be taken seriously—or as seriously as such unserious times will allow. Yet at the same time, these same people will theatrically wax poetic about the beauty of religion and the dangers of secularism. They simultaneously credit Christianity as the foundation of the West while denigrating the modern world it has supposedly created. They deplore moralising from the perch of their own soap boxes. They pooh-pooh truth as an ideal while ‘embracing traditions’ that fundamentally rest on truth claims. Faitheism, on this score, is the worst of both worlds: all of the sanctimony, none of the conviction.

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that truth isn’t real, or doesn’t matter—putting aside the inconvenient fact that this is itself a truth claim—and evaluate this New Faitheism by its own metric of social and cultural usefulness. Which modern woes can this emerging creed reverse? Not post-truth, as New Faitheism is an outgrowth of it. Not the crisis of meaning and community, since cultural religiosity provides neither. A movement that ridicules rationalism, scientific scepticism, and humanism also isn’t particularly well placed to elevate the character of public discourse, heal tribal divides, promote a shared reality, rebut rampant conspiracism, or improve institutional trust. Aside from helping content creators generate clicks and subscriptions from anti-woke audiences, I cannot identify a single way in which this trend helps anyone. And yet, in each and every area where New Faitheism proves useless, New Atheism—or something similar—can in fact be of genuine help.

As a young adult graduating college in the late 2000s, New Atheism offered me, and so many other Millennials, a framework that reoriented our lives in demonstrably fruitful ways. New Atheism equipped me with the basics of critical thinking found nowhere in my 16-year formal education. It taught me the value of evidence, first principles, logical consistency, parsimony, avoiding fallacies, and epistemic rigour in a way nothing else had ever even attempted to. It introduced me to the life of the mind and helped foster an interest in science, philosophy, and recreational reading. New Atheism gave me and millions of other young people at the time not only the tools to think more clearly, but a social incentive structure that made us want to. Within New Atheist spaces, caring about what was actually true was reinforced, epistemic humility was cool, assertions without evidence were stigmatised, and conceding a point when demonstrably proven wrong was applauded.

Did some people become too pushy or strident? Sure. Did the movement attract a certain kind of pedantic, fedora-clad, spectrumy young man? Yeah, it did. Did everyone fully live up to the ideals they purported to hold? Of course not. But boy, just having those ideals was transformative. And placed side by side with a New Faitheist movement that doesn’t even aspire to seek truth or ground their arguments in first principles, the difference could not be more stark.

In this age of post-truth, misinformation, illiberalism, anti-intellectualism, and above all cruelty, we need a movement that is relentlessly evidence-based, willing to engage those who disagree, unafraid of walking into the lions’ den, and anchored to consistently applied Enlightenment first principles. New Atheism was not without its flaws, but its intellectual core is something well worth recapturing.

We should all want to live in a reality-based society. This is why a return to honest-to-God religion is also no solution to the problems we face. Again, we need less dogmatism and disregard for evidence, not more. If we are to meet the challenges of the 21st century, both individually and collectively, we’re going to need to live in the real world. The current crop of cool kids tell us this is cringe, but all they have to offer is an irony-poisoned postmodern matrix of misremembered nostalgia and cherry-picked religious vibes. New Faitheism is a movement that stands for nothing—a clout-mining operation riding the coattails of an unrelated cultural backlash. It appears ascendent, but a movement this fundamentally hollow and substanceless will fold like a cheap suit the moment it is assertively confronted. And that confrontation is long since overdue.