A Bulwark Against the Cult of Power
Roger Berkowitz
01-12-2025
The decline of religion is an old story. A few years ago I described this decline in an essay I co-wrote with my former student Anna Hadfield. We wrote:
"In 1933, a document entitled “A Humanist Manifesto” was published in a small but burgeoning American magazine called The New Humanist. The manifesto—which was co-signed by more than thirty writers, Unitarian ministers, and academics, including the philosopher John Dewey—announced a “new religion” forged from “the materials of the modern world.” Religion had shown itself to be powerless before the demands of the twentieth century; at least in its traditional practice, religion was ill-suited to an age shaped by “vastly increased knowledge and experience.” A new worldview was therefore necessary, one that would “formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method” and discourage “sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.” This religion would recognize human beings as a part of nature and so reject any supernatural or cosmic accounts of human life and human values. It would look to many like “a complete break with the past,” for it would “affirm life rather than deny it.” This new religion, the manifesto declared, would be called humanism.
In the years following the publication of the Humanist Manifesto, the term “humanism” became associated with a rejection of religion and a championing of science and rationality as the conjoined hope of the modern age. Several English and American organizations aligned themselves explicitly with the humanist cause. In 1941, the American Humanist Association was founded, an outgrowth of the previously existing Humanist Fellowship at the University of Chicago. In 1967, the Union of Ethical Societies, a British organization founded in the late nineteenth century, changed its name to the British Humanist Association. And in 1972, the Rationalist Association, another British organization and press, changed the name of its longstanding magazine to New Humanist. Today, humanism remains as widespread a term as ever before, perhaps even more so due to the term’s appropriation by a group of popular atheist writers, called the New Atheists, whose viewpoints many in the humanist community have embraced.
The core of modern humanism has been the promise of liberation from bondage to religion and tradition. “Man is at last becoming aware,” proclaims the 1933 Manifesto, “that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.”3 As science teaches us about the universe and about ourselves, we overcome the limitations to human freedom and progress that once were ascribed to divine will, human sinfulness, and fate. A society guided by science and humanism will not only be free from the constraints of religious dogma but will be animated by a universal benevolence, as religious belief is regarded as one of the primary sources of hatred and conflict."
The New Atheists as a term was rebranded post 9/11 by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others who railed against the backwardness and irrationality of religion. And the numbers tell the story. In 2020, for the first time, the number of Americans who reported belonging to a religious community fell below 50 percent for the first time. In the years following the publication of the Humanist Manifesto, the term “humanism” became associated with a rejection of religion and a championing of science and rationality as the conjoined hope of the modern age. Several English and American organizations aligned themselves explicitly with the humanist cause. In 1941, the American Humanist Association was founded, an outgrowth of the previously existing Humanist Fellowship at the University of Chicago. In 1967, the Union of Ethical Societies, a British organization founded in the late nineteenth century, changed its name to the British Humanist Association. And in 1972, the Rationalist Association, another British organization and press, changed the name of its longstanding magazine to New Humanist. Today, humanism remains as widespread a term as ever before, perhaps even more so due to the term’s appropriation by a group of popular atheist writers, called the New Atheists, whose viewpoints many in the humanist community have embraced.
The core of modern humanism has been the promise of liberation from bondage to religion and tradition. “Man is at last becoming aware,” proclaims the 1933 Manifesto, “that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.”3 As science teaches us about the universe and about ourselves, we overcome the limitations to human freedom and progress that once were ascribed to divine will, human sinfulness, and fate. A society guided by science and humanism will not only be free from the constraints of religious dogma but will be animated by a universal benevolence, as religious belief is regarded as one of the primary sources of hatred and conflict."
And yet, as Peter Savodnik writes, there is a sudden and unexpected religious revival going on amongst an unlikely demographic: intellectuals. Savodnik offers accounts of numerous members of the “so-called thinking classes” who have recently found themselves through finding God. Matthew Crawford, who spoke at the Hannah Arendt Center’s conference “Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis” in 2013, converted to the Anglican Church last year. He explains:
“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.
“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.
“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”
Jordan Hall “stumbled on the Swannanoa Christian Church. Red brick. White steeple. Small congregation with a few hundred souls. He felt it immediately.” For Hall, religion was a response to an overwhelming emptiness and the brokenness of people: Savodnik writes quoting Hall: “We’re actually facing a clear and present danger,” Hall said. “It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.
“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”
He meant plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. “The horrifying brokenness of people.”
Even Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the former New Atheists, has found God and converted to Christianity.
"Hirsi Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020. “I was telling him about my depression,” Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, “and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ” Mozart, opera, church hymns—they were a way out of the dark, she said. She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: “The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.”
In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
It is a real question of whether the new faith amongst these intellectuals is authentic, or whether it is the product of a rational search for meaning in a broken world. Savodnik raises that question: In 2022, she started to come around to the idea of Christianity, going to church, thinking, reading: Who was this Christian God? And what was the nature of one’s relationship with him? How did that change you?
Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack was proof, like the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, of everything she had long believed about Islam. She was horrified, but she was also amazed by the Israelis’ conviction. “What I find with my Jewish friends was this blind faith in Israel and the existence of Israel—there will be a Zionist movement, there will be a home for the Jewish people,” she said. “They are immersed in these biblical stories. It’s a story of faith.”
In November of that year, Hirsi Ali published an essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”—a response to Bertrand Russell—in UnHerd. “We can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools,” she wrote. “To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.”
"The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?
Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”
“The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings,” Sullivan said. “It allows us to express our faith through an act.”
"This brokenness may explain why, for the first time in American history, young men—who have been especially hard hit by the opioid crisis, and are getting fewer college degrees, and finding it harder than ever to land a job—are more religious than young women. A survey of Orthodox churches in the United States, for example, reported a 78 percent rise in converts from 2019 to 2022, with the new male believers outnumbering the female."
Hannah Arendt understood that human beings need transcendence. In a secular and worldly age, she found transcendence in politics, the coming together of people to form a common world with aspirations and goals beyond mere self-interest. The failure of politics to provide that transcendence today may well be one reason for the renewed turn to faith. The question is, whether such a renewed faith is more than just a last-ditch effort to fix the brokenness of our society. Reading Savodnik’s essay is well worth your time.