The evolution of Richard Dawkins

Hello all,

A few columns for you today. I was invited several months ago to write for WORLD magazine, and my first column—on atheist Richard Dawkins’ pivot from virulently anti-Christian to becoming a self-described “cultural Christian”—ran last week. An excerpt:

In 2013, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins announced that teaching children about hell was tantamount to abuse. In 2015, the author of The God Delusion elaborated further, telling the Irish Times that children needed to be “protected” from the religious beliefs of their parents and that we must “write off” those who believed in Scripture. It was a grotesque but unsurprising suggestion from a man who had spent years attacking Christianity.

Less than a decade later in 2024, Richard Dawkins has changed his tune. He still clearly despises the truths of Christianity, but he has abandoned his characteristic contempt and now calls himself “a cultural Chrisitan.” How has this evolution come about?

Dawkins became an atheist culture warrior in the years following 9/11, when the New Atheist movement emerged in the wake of Islamist terror and the sex scandals wracking the Roman Catholic Church. The most prominent of these atheist polemicists were the men dubbed the movement’s “Four Horsemen”: philosopher Daniel Dennett, journalist Christopher Hitchens, neuroscientist Sam Harris, and Dawkins himself. Each published bestselling books attacking God and religion that were briefly but wildly popular.

The New Atheist movement has since spectacularly collapsed and Justin Brierly describes its demise in his fascinating new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Hitchens and Dennett have died, and Harris has turned to writing and podcasting on other topics. Indeed, the rise of wokeness, the all-encompassing digital age, and the decline of Western power have forced many atheists to admit that Christianity will not, as it turns out, be replaced by the rationalist regimes they dreamed of. The West is gripped by a crisis of meaning—and atheists have nothing to offer.

Dawkins himself has been forced to confront this fact, and he appears to have realized of late that the society he cherishes—one in which freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and other principles he apparently chalked up to the evolutionary process, are the rule—may not be possible in the anti-Christian culture he once strove so hard to bring about. In 2018, a mere three years after he suggested that children needed to be “protected” from Christianity, he tweeted out a Guardian article on “the rise of a non-Christian Europe” with the caption:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme: “Always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.”

You can read the whole thing here, if you’re interested. Richard Dawkins’ conversion to believing that Christianity is essential for the survival of the West is an increasingly common one among a certain segment of the Western elites these days, and it is another indication of people realizing “what time it is,” as the saying goes.

Over at The European Conservative, I have a (less depressing than usual) column on the pervasive influence of Tintin in Belgium, based on observations during my stay there: “The Last Native Belgian: Tintin in Brussels.”

My friend Andrew Lawton’s second book was just published, a biography of federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. It’s a very interesting look at the man who will likely become the next prime minister. I interviewed Lawton on the book, and you can listen to that here.

I have several more columns scheduled for publication, which I’ll hopefully send out next week. Finally, as always, I’ve got plenty of other short, regular culture updates on The Bridgehead, and you can get a copy of Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield here and here, and my other books here.

Thanks for reading!