Religion Is Not Merely Mistaken but Harmful and Should Be Criticised Openly

New Atheism names a polemical current that emerged in the mid-2000s, associated chiefly with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, distinguished from earlier forms of unbelief less by its arguments than by its tone and its target: the claim is not only that religious belief is false but that treating it with polite deference is itself harmful, and that religion should accordingly be criticised openly rather than granted the reticence more conventional secular liberalism had generally extended it. Dawkins's own The God Delusion, one of the movement's best known texts, argues the central case directly, that religious moderation provides unearned cultural cover for religious extremism by keeping faith itself broadly immune from the kind of sustained public criticism any other strongly held claim would face. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism situates New Atheism as a literary and media phenomenon rather than a membership organisation, with no shared creed, formal leadership or governing body, its coherence as a current resting on a shared publishing moment, several bestselling books appearing within a few years of one another, rather than on any institutional structure comparable to the organised humanist bodies it is sometimes grouped alongside.

Stephen LeDrew's history of the modern secular movement traces New Atheism's reception as contested from within organised atheism and humanism itself as much as from outside it, not only a fight between believers and unbelievers. LeDrew documents a fracture within the wider secular movement in the early 2010s, sometimes called the Atheism Plus split, in which a portion of secular activists argued that atheism and humanism needed to be paired explicitly with social justice commitments, feminism and opposition to racism chief among them, while other prominent New Atheist figures and their followers rejected that pairing as a departure from the movement's proper focus on religion and reason alone, a disagreement conducted largely in public online forums and conferences rather than through any formal institutional process. LeDrew situates this fragmentation as evidence that New Atheism was never the unified current its shared publishing moment made it briefly appear to be, a coalition of writers and readers who agreed that religion deserved open, sustained criticism but who turned out to disagree considerably once the conversation moved past that single shared premise to questions of tone, priority and what, beyond criticising religion, the movement's wider social commitments ought to be.