Content area
Full Text
The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement. By Stephen LeDrew . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. x + 280 pp. $27.95 cloth
Dozens of books and articles have been written about New Atheism and its leading figures, yet the literature suffers from two serious limitations. First, most studies only discuss New Atheism's most prominent representatives: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Some commentators focus even more narrowly on one or two of them. This overlooks the many other intellectuals involved in the movement and, even more seriously, its mass base. As Steven Kettell correctly notes, most New Atheists are “arranged in a loosely connected, non-hierarchical and decentralised fashion, with no formal representative” (“Faithless: The Politics of New Atheism,” In Secularism & Nonreligion, Vol. 2, 64). Second, most studies reiterate the same, often superficial, criticisms of New Atheism. In particular, detractors attempt to show that New Atheism is a militant effort to expunge religion from public life.
Stephen LeDrew in The Evolution of New Atheism makes a noteworthy effort to overcome the first limitation. LeDrew says at the outset that his goal is “to bring a sociological perspective to this topic, which to date has primarily been the province of philosophers and theologians” (2). To do this, LeDrew not only considers the work of New Atheism's leading figures but also those who tend to be marginalized in the secondary literature, such as Steven Pinker, A.C. Grayling, Victor Stenger, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Lawrence Krauss. More importantly, he shows that “It is not restricted to a group of elite thinkers; rather, it...