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You would have to have been hitchhiking across Siberia to have missed a striking new phenomenon: The atheists are back. Not just back, mind you, but globally parading in triumph across tv, bookstores, and the Internet. But don't be tongue-tied; an unlikely God Squad (including the flamboyant Al Sharpton) is taking them on.

In the past 12 months, atheist authors, according to The Wall Street Journal, have created a publishing sensation, selling more than 1 million books worldwide. These include: 500,000 hardcover copies of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006); 296,000 in sales for Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007).

The leader of the atheist pack is Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, holder of the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University. Simonyi is one of the Microsoft billionaires. An atheist, he insisted that Dawkins be the first holder of his professorship because, as he said, Dawkins would be "Darwin's rottweiler."

Dawkins sets the tone for the new atheist surge, describing the God of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it … petty … unjust, [an] unforgiving control-freak … misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal. … "

Meanwhile, ex-Englishman Hitchens (who once provoked left-wing British mp George Galloway into calling him "a drink-sodden, former Trotskyist popinjay") supports Bush on Iraq, opposes abortion, but considers being a Christian comparable to citizenship in North Korea. In God Is Not Great, the provocative and quotable Hitchens says, "Monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents."

Why a surge by atheists right now? One explanation could be "faith fatigue" among skeptics and the hard-core Left, who ordinarily make up 15 percent of the American people (and a much higher percentage of the European intelligentsia). After six years of a famously evangelical White House, the secularists have recovered from their repudiation at the polls and have come out swinging.

Another explanation is subtler. American evangelicals, we must admit, have not been immune to triumphal attitudes, arrogance, foolish public statements, and, sometimes, downright hypocrisy in personal behavior. A backlash against evangelicals has been brewing for years.

The good news? First, a bracing frontal assault on faith is actually good for evangelicalism. It compels us to reexamine what we believe and to behave—well, with greater humility.

Second, this backlash has produced a fascinating response among believers. For example, the most effective public debater with Christopher Hitchens to date has been Brooklyn Baptist and verbal flame-thrower the Rev. Al Sharpton.

In a debate, Hitchens disparaged the God-fearing sensibilities of Martin Luther King Jr., angering Sharpton. "In terms of the civil-rights movement," Sharpton responded, "it was absolutely fueled by a belief in God and a belief in right or wrong. Had not there been this belief that there was a right and a wrong, the civil-rights movement that you alluded to and referred to would not have existed."

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October 2007, Vol. 51, No. 10

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