The Four Horsemen of New Theism

The Prophets of Modern Re-Enchantment

Things have gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Social trust is plummeting, loneliness is epidemic, AI slop proliferates, and microplastics invade our blood, brains, and even breast milk. But the most disheartening statistic in my mind is this: 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and 20 percent have seriously considered ending their lives. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults. Our children increasingly don’t want to live in the world we have made for them. With problems this serious, we need more than policy nudges and algorithmic tweaks. We need a civilizational course correction. But first, we must understand what is making us sick.

Twenty years ago, a group of thinkers converged on an answer: religion. In a series of best-selling books, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens—widely nicknamed the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”—argued that religion was an infantile indulgence, an irrational scourge, and a perennial obstacle to peace and happiness. For Dennett, “I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.” Dawkins claimed that religion was a “delusion,” a “mental illness,” and “a force for evil in the world.” Hitchens asserted that “faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” Harris pleaded, “Religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.”

The new atheists were nothing if not strident. And for about two decades, millions listened. In the early 2000s, about 42 percent of Americans attended church regularly. By 2024, that had dropped to 30 percent. In 2000, about 8 percent identified as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” By 2022, the share of “nones” had nearly quadrupled to 31 percent.

But curiously, America seems to have turned back from the path toward European-style secularization—Americans are giving religion another look. The decline in religiosity has slowed and, in some places, reversed. Many “nones” have turned back into “somes.”

The reasons for this mini-revival are no doubt complex, but one of them, I’d wager, is that the promises of the New Atheists proved empty. Declining faith didn’t lead to less division, less ignorance, and more reasoned moral discourse. On the contrary, as Justin Brierley writes in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: “The secular utopia never arrived. Instead of reason triumphing, we got the rise of conspiracy theories, political extremism and deep tribal divisions.”

In this new moment of spiritual openness, four recently published books—All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart, Believe by Ross Douthat, Living in Wonder by Rod Dreher, and Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth—offer a very different diagnosis for our civilization’s ills. Although these books vary widely in tone and emphasis, they share a core belief: our crisis is spiritual, rooted in an aggressive, reductive materialism that looks upon the wonder of creation and sees only lifeless matter to analyze, control and exploit. They also converge on a shared hope that amid the ruins of Christendom, genuine religious life can be reborn in the West. Taken together, these books represent the definitive death of the New Atheism and the emergence of a new set of intellectual equestrians. Okay, I’ll say it. “The Four Horsemen of New Theism.”

David Bentley Hart

Consciousness is strange. I’m sitting on a tree-shaded patio of a coffee shop, feeling a gentle breeze, listening to William Byrd’s “Mass for Four Voices” and remembering the time my wife and I drove a Vespa across the south of France. How are all these thoughts and memories happening? And where are they happening? In the brain, you might respond. Well sure, but where exactly? In the hippocampus or amygdala? In the cerebral cortex or parietal lobes? Or is consciousness found deeper down, in the synapses, atoms, or molecules? Scientists just don’t know. It’s what philosopher David Chalmers famously called “the hard problem of consciousness”—how can physical processes give rise to subjective experience?

Recently, many scientists have started embracing the theory of “emergence”—which posits that even though no individual neuron is conscious in itself, when the brain’s billions of individual neurons interact dynamically with each other, they give rise to subjective awareness, intentionality, and memory. For the theologian David Bentley Hart, this idea is poppycock. “Emergence,” he argues, is just another way of saying “magic.” Consciousness will never be accurately explained by scientists because they are blinded by their unshakeable faith in materialism.

In his dazzling philosophical dialogue All Things Are Full of Gods, Hart takes aim at the foundational assumptions of materialism, the worldview that everything that exists is ultimately reducible to matter in motion. In his view, this “mechanistic philosophy” is a metaphysical myth masquerading as a scientific certainty.

His book is structured as six days of debate between the Greek gods Psyche, Hermes, Hephaestus, and Eros, who each present different sides of the debate over whether mind or matter is the fundamental structure of reality. In the premodern past, and in most non-Western cultures, reality is understood to be saturated with spirit, pregnant with meaning, and full of inherent purpose and fullness. As Psyche explains, “For most of their history, [humans] naturally viewed all of cosmic nature as the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences—gods and nymphs, daemons and elves, phantoms and goblins, and every other kind of nature spirit or preternatural agency.”

But a series of theological and philosophical developments in Europe began a process that has narrowed our vision and diminished our perceptions of the sacred. The scientific method that emerged in the sixteenth century was originally meant to be just that—a method, a tool for answering certain questions. But as the Scientific Revolution progressed, thinkers like Descartes, Newton, and Hobbes began to describe the universe as a vast machine governed by mathematical laws. And though often still religious themselves, philosophers no longer felt they could defend the claims of theism because they couldn’t test them empirically. Religion shrank to the domain of private sentiment, and science became the only arbiter of truth. Calculation, not contemplation, became the highest mode of thought; only the measurable was meaningful.

This banishment of spiritual realities from our culture and our picture of a dead world full of mere matter to manipulate has left us lonely, in despair, and adrift. But our hearts still long for deeper communion with a living world, and we are increasingly looking for it in strange places.

As Hart writes: “The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind’s long, ever deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences. They call out to the stars and scan the skies with enormous radio telescopes, searching for the faintest whisper of a response. They convince themselves that their machines might become sentient. They dream of creating a virtual reality responsive to their needs in a way that the now spiritually evacuated world around them no longer seems to be.”

The world and human beings are not machines, argues Hart, but emanations of a divine mind. Consciousness is not an accident of random selection, but a reflection of the source of all creation and possibility—in other words, God. The foundation of all reality is spiritual.

All Things Are Full of Gods helps us see and experience the wonder in language, in the variety of physical forms and the mysterious fact that we can perceive it all with the depth and richness that we do. “The reality the modern world chooses to impose is a ‘rationality’ of the narrowest kind, obsessed with what things are and how they might be used rather than struck with wonder by the inexplicable truth that things are.”

Ross Douthat

Like Hart, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has made a career of puncturing the barely considered secular assumptions of his educated liberal readership. But Believe is not an antiatheist polemic—it’s a sincere invitation for the God-curious, a population of people that has grown in recent years as the fruits of strident secularism have turned increasingly sour. Like the French philosopher Blaise Pascal 350 years ago, Douthat wants to persuade religious fence-sitters to be bolder and bet on belief.

He begins his apologia by pointing out that many agnostics harbor a vague notion that science has disproved much of the foundations of theism, in particular the idea of a creator god who made a world especially for us. Douthat contends that the opposite is true. “We have much better evidence for the proposition that the universe was made with human beings in mind . . . than ancient or medieval peoples ever did.” Central to this claim is the array of physical laws and constants that suggest some kind of cosmic “fine-tuning” designed to enable creatures like us to be viable. Skeptics counter with the multiverse theory, postulating the existence of infinite other universes, with our life-friendly one just a lucky accident. But Douthat rightly points out that such theories require perhaps even more faith than theism. “Just as Darwinian theory did not actually resolve the metaphysical questions raised by the universe’s beautifully ordered existence, these moves do not sweep away the persistent fingerprints of God.”

Then there’s the unexpected durability of what Douthat calls “the spooky stuff.” David Hume and other Enlightenment skeptics expected miracles, encounters with supernatural beings, and all manner of mystical experiences to decline as the proportion of believers in society waned. Yet even as the number of “nones” has dramatically risen, people continue to experience and report encounters with the unexplainable—from visitations, to near-death experiences, to miraculous cures for the incurable. Such experiences are chinks in the armor of what he calls “Official Knowledge”—the narrow range of empirically testable modern beliefs. Douthat encourages this more capacious picture of reality: “There are more things in heaven and earth than can be measured and distilled by scientific materialism.”

And if you are one of these newly God-curious seekers willing to give belief a chance, what religion should you join? Douthat suggests that any spiritual path is better than none, but the smart choice is to go big and go old. The tried and tested religions of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are more likely to be true and good for you than your own bespoke path. “Putting together a religious worldview entirely on your own, simply taking a bit here from one faith or a bit there from another, presumes a lot upon the strength of your individual intellect and moral compass, to say nothing of more supernatural questions.”

Rod Dreher

Douthat’s reason-based arguments for God will open the door to faith for some. But for the Orthodox convert Rod Dreher, Western Christianity suffers from the broader culture’s hyper-rationality and needs to learn from the Eastern Church how to cultivate a more heart-centered spiritual life. This is the aim of his book Living In Wonder. “I am convinced that the only way to revive the Christian faith,” writes Dreher, “which is fading fast from the modern world, is not through moral exhortation, legalistic browbeating, or more effective apologetics but through mystery and the encounter with wonder.”

Disenchantment is the name the German sociologist Max Weber gave to the ascendance of the mechanistic, materialist worldview. For Dreher, wonder is the essential tool of re-enchantment because it is “a rigorous discipline of attention. It is the act of consenting to beauty in a world that has learned to ignore it.” Prayer and beauty are the two primary means of re-enchanting our lives and experiencing the sacramental nature of reality, the perception that “all created things bear divine power and participate in the life of God.” Prayer is vital because it helps us cultivate attention, and a living faith requires perception, not conception. Beauty, whether a mountain valley or the illuminated windows of Chartres, are a revelation of God, who is beauty’s ultimate source. Prayer, beauty, and liturgy help us not just know about God, but know God.

Dreher’s emphasis on attention draws heavily from the work of neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, whose pioneering research on brain hemispheres argues that in Western cultures “science, mathematics, and empirical reasoning (left brain) have crowded out poetry, art, and religion (right brain) as ways of knowing.” Becoming so left-brained has blinded us to the true and wilder nature of reality. “The world is not what we think it is,” writes Dreher. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful. We do not create meaning; meaning is already there, waiting to be discovered.”

What “true enchantment” really is, “is simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves. It is living with faith to know that meaning and commune with it.” To that end, it is vital for us to learn “how to perceive the presence of the divine in daily life and to create habits that open our eyes and our hearts to him.”

But to see God requires repentance. In Dreher’s words, “If we want to live, we have to turn our lives around and walk away from the false parts of the Enlightenment and toward the true Light.” Such a total revolution is not primarily intellectual but affective and bodily: “We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can find it only by participating in his life.”

Paul Kingsnorth

Perhaps no single event was more significant in signaling a cultural shift toward religion than the 2021 publication of Paul Kingsnorth’s story of his conversion to Christianity in First Things. A former ecoactivism leader, Kingsnorth tried atheism, Buddhism, and even Wicca before a series of mystical experiences led him to embrace Christianity. In the years since that essay, Kingsnorth has quickly become, in my view, the most important intellectual convert to Christianity since C. S. Lewis.

Against the Machine is a searing indictment of our technological civilization and a manifesto for spiritual resistance. “The Machine” is the name Kingsnorth gives to modernity’s relentless pursuit of control, technological advancement, and materialism. Like Hart, Douthat, and Dreher, Kingsnorth identifies the root of the problem as a scientific and Enlightenment worldview run amok. But where those authors seek in their writing to save a moribund but nonetheless revivable Western civilization, he is much more pessimistic. The West, Kingsnorth believes, already died long ago, and we are merely living in its ruins. Cause of death? The abandonment of Christ and our worship of false gods—consumerism, progress, nationalism, and ultimately ourselves.

What does the Machine want? Total control and predictability. The conquering of space and time. Liberation from every constraint. Anything standing in the way of that goal can be discarded. The five-hundred-year culmination of the Machine is AI, which seeks to transcend the final limitation: humanity. “We are headed very quickly now, and increasingly openly,” Kingsnorth warns, “towards the endgame of this whole project: transhumanism, the attempt to both immortalise ourselves and to build new intelligences alongside us that will act as our servants in the new age we are making.”

In our new regime of algorithms and probabilities, “the things which cannot be measured will of course be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A sense of being rooted. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art.”

Politics can’t save us. For Kingsnorth, liberals and conservatives may appear different on the surface, but they both affirm the logic of endless growth, technological control, and consumerism. Nor will nostalgia. A return to a supposedly more pristine past is a paralyzing fantasy. Our only hope is to rebuild genuine culture—to commit to particular places with particular people, to embrace prayer and a sacramental way of life that prioritizes surrender, humility, and a transcendent order. Walk away from the Machine and pick up the Cross. “The ultimate goal of all traditional religion,” he writes, “is to understand the world as sacred again, and to remake our souls in its light.”

Together, these Four Horsemen (perhaps better to call them the Four Evangelists?) of New Theism have helped achieve a once unimaginable vibe shift—they’ve made Christianity the smart and even cool choice. Of course, this spiritual flowering builds on seeds planted over decades by faith-full writers and poets such as Thomas Keating, Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Christian Wiman, Denise Levertov, Richard Rohr, and many others. Defeating Silicon Valley’s transhumanist machine won’t be easy, but those willing to join the resistance have a powerful and growing arsenal of arguments and personal witnesses for the battles ahead.

New Atheism promised liberation from the shackles of faith. Instead, it delivered spiritual exhaustion, cultural fragmentation, and an epidemic of despair. Its godless vision of the world—sterile, mechanistic, soulless—has not made us more rational. It has made us more desperate, more lost.

Renewal will require not more liberation, but limits. A deeper, richer form of freedom found in dedication to community, contemplation, and faith. As Kingsnorth writes, “It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom. It is building a life in which you can see the stars and taste the air. . . . It is to speak truth and try to live it, to set your boundaries and refuse to step over them.”

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare.

Art by Jessica Sarah Beach.