As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution.
“Not believing in God was no longer just fashionable,” as journalist Peter Savodnik put it. “It was, for those on campus, for best-selling authors, for those who dominated our most rarefied intellectual spaces, the only rational position worth having.”
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No longer.
In the fall of 2025, it sometimes feels as if every influencer in good standing has gotten religion. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, E.J. Dionne, Peter Thiel, Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Brooks, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are only the most prominent of intellectuals who have gone public with good things to say about God, ranging from vague invocations of a universal force to doctrinal Christianity.
What’s going on?
I have a theory: We are emerging from the West’s intellectual adolescence.
Beginning in the late 1600s, the Enlightenment delivered a series of body blows to the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible.
They began with Newton’s clockwork universe and concluded with Darwinian evolution, Freudian psychology and Einsteinian relativity.
But the Enlightenment, a great force for progress in some ways, suffered from tunnel vision. Reason and empiricism were enthroned as the only legitimate framework for intellectual inquiry.
By the late 19th century, “scientism,” as William James called it, had taken on some of organized religion’s unattractive features, treating intellectuals who tried to explore the supernatural as heretics.
By the middle of the 20th century, academia’s appraisal of religion amounted to “Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.”
That’s the message I got when I reached Harvard in the fall of 1961.
None of my professors was religious (at least visibly). I didn’t have any friends who were religious.
When the topic of religion came up, professors and friends alike treated it dismissively or as a subject for humor.
I didn’t expend energy rejecting religion. It was irrelevant. I ignored it.
It took another quarter-century for religion to cross my mind, and then only because my wife had become engaged in Quakerism.
It took another decade of watching it play a growing role in her life for me to recognize how unreflective I had been.
Then, in the late 1990s, I began researching and writing a book that would be published as “Human Accomplishment.”
As I compiled my inventories of accomplishment in literature, music and the visual arts, it seemed obvious to me the quality of artistic accomplishment cratered in the 20th century.
Popular culture was vibrant but not high culture. In my opinion, atonal music was unlistenable. Most modern art was sterile, childish or ugly. “Serious” novels and plays were lifeless.
One explanation is that I’m a philistine. But another possibility is secularization had displaced the classic ideals that drove high culture from 1500 through most of the 1800s.
In the Western tradition, excellence in the arts was defined by Truth, Beauty and the Good — qualities Aristotle originally identified, later transmuted into Christian values.
Artists saw themselves as tapping into the transcendental truths relevant to their fields.
Individual artists may or may not have been devout, but they all lived in a religious environment that kept Truth, Beauty and the Good in their minds as objectives.
Beginning in the late 1800s, those who saw themselves as engaged in high culture became overwhelmingly secular.
They rejected not just religious faith but the relevance of Truth, Beauty and the Good to their work.
The artist’s duty became to “challenge” the audience, from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.
When atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote, “Those who compose because they want to please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists,” he was expressing the godlike position many artists ascribed to themselves as well as the contempt they had for their audiences.
By the time “Human Accomplishment” was finished, I had concluded that when religion no longer supplies a framework for thinking about transcendent qualities, artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and their personal preferences tended to be self-absorbed and banal.
As an unbeliever, what was I to make of that?
One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had foolishly imagined they were tapping into the transcendent, and their delusion inspired them.
But that line of thought became embarrassing when I confronted their work.
Is it plausible that those individuals who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uniformly stupid about the great questions?
I decided they understood things we don’t.
Johann Sebastian Bach does not need to explain himself.
His music makes a prima facie case that his way of looking at the universe needs to be taken seriously. I am obligated to do so.
Perhaps a similar realization has been dawning on other overeducated agnostics.
Children of the Enlightenment, we have seen ourselves as more rational than earlier generations and in the process cut ourselves off from mankind’s accumulated wisdom about topics that do not lend themselves to pure reason and empiricism.
That was a mistake.
Hence the adolescence analogy.
A common symptom of adolescence is deciding your parents are wrong about everything.
A common symptom of adulthood is realizing your parents are smarter than you thought.
Maybe we’re starting to grow up.
Charles Murray’s latest book is “Taking Religion Seriously.”
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