Abstract
Various contemporary phenomena of social regression and authoritarianism are related to religious actors, movements, and beliefs. This text, however, seeks to follow this up with the political–theoretical argumentation that New Atheism has to be understood as a way of thinking which carries illiberal and authoritarian tendencies with it as well. In defence of this position, this article will first reconstruct, with reference to Habermas’s and Rawls’s theory of democracy, elements that must include personal beliefs in order to be considered congruent with democratic values. Subsequently, New Atheism’s conception of rational politics will be presented in order to show in which aspects it contradicts the demands of reasonable convictions. This concerns, in particular, the rejection of reasonable pluralism on the one hand and a non-positivistic view of human beings on the other. As a conclusion, this text supports the proposition that, when speaking of the connection between certain worldviews and today’s illiberalism, New Atheism must also be considered as an unreasonable comprehensive doctrine.
Highlights
It is undisputed that many forms of social regression currently observed in liberal democracies—a depletion of the rule of law or the multilateral international order, hostility towards ethnical or sexual minorities, nationalistic hubris, et cetera—are in various ways linked to religious identities, beliefs, and actors.1 The Polish PiS, for instance, supports the narrative that its measures should enforce the cultural values of an national and Catholic identity against the influence of a hegemonic cosmopolitan and liberal elite, as, for example, embodied in the European Union or the European Court of Human Rights
I first define reasonableness and explain why it is important for democratic societies, following Rawls’s and Habermas’s political theory (Section 2.1)
Theory of Justice poses the question of whether ordinary citizens, when they engage in political activities such as casting their vote in an election, should bow to the duty of justice or can rationally pursue their interests that are inclined towards their own good (Rawls 1972, 360f.)
Summary
It is undisputed that many forms of social regression currently observed in liberal democracies—a depletion of the rule of law or the multilateral international order, hostility towards ethnical or sexual minorities, nationalistic hubris, et cetera—are in various ways linked to religious identities, beliefs, and actors. The Polish PiS, for instance, supports the narrative that its measures should enforce the cultural values of an national and Catholic identity against the influence of a hegemonic cosmopolitan and liberal elite, as, for example, embodied in the European Union or the European Court of Human Rights (see for example Bobowicz and Nowak or Sadlon on this special issue, cf. Köllner 2018). New Atheism does not want to be a purely theoretical undertaking, but by embedding itself into the political public sphere tries to exert influence on public opinion By doing so, it understands itself as an enterprise against the diverse forms of (supposed) “social dogmatism” (Hans Albert) that are practiced by religious actors and believers.. To make the scope of the following clear, the aim is not to analyse empirically whether New Atheism has anywhere—directly or indirectly—led to policies that can be classified as illiberal or authoritarian Rather, it is to argue on a purely intellectual level that the worldview and political ideas of New Atheism are in contradiction to publicly reasonable ones. I conclude that when speaking about religion’s relation to current forms of illiberalism, it is necessary to consider (at least) some forms of New Atheism as an important phenomenon in connection to today’s illiberalism as well
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