The New Atheists predicted that less religion would make society more rational. Twenty years of secularization in America has stalled, and some European countries show religious revival. The world got less religious but not more reasonable.
I think that we are in a really interesting cultural moment around religion in the U.S. and the Western world, where we've sort of reached the endpoint, I think, of a period of secularization that started maybe roughly 20 years ago, started around the heyday of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc., and really continued, I think, through the pandemic. And then sort of hit its limit. And you can see this in the numbers. You can see the number of Americans with no religious affiliation had been going up and up, and now it's plateaued. And you have interesting data from some Western European countries that suggest there's an actual modest religious revival. And I think you can see it in intellectual life too, that we're not at the point of sort of, you know, mass conversions to traditional religion, but we're at a point where The kind of new atheist case that getting rid of religious belief was going to make the world a better place doesn't really seem persuasive to very many people in 2025, given the world does not seem to have become a calmer, more reasonable, and more scientific place as it's become less religious.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp & Rep. Ritchie Torres on Innovation & The West | Hill and Valley Forum 2024
