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This book’s final chapter inquires into the consequences of living in the light of Niebuhr’s complex teaching. The illusions of naive optimism reign today just as in his lifetime. Niebuhr’s legacy of critical Christian thought invites us to reflect on the need for self-knowledge, doubt, and toleration in today’s world. Niebuhr’s Christian social ethics appreciates the advances of the natural and social sciences without placing supreme confidence in their authority and certitude. His hard-edged realism is badly needed in a world full of wishful thinking; self-critical Niebuhrianism is the best response to the new atheistic critics, such as Christopher Hitchens. Niebuhr agrees with contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson and literary critic Terry Eagleton that supreme certitude yields an attitude that makes “Christianity un-Christian.” His sense of human limits does not negate human achievement so much as it puts human hope into a grander, more complex way of understanding.

This chapter examines the work of three essayists and political commentators whose writing has attracted considerable attention in recent decades. Hitchens could be a dazzling and entertaining polemicist, though his later work was sometimes marred by a ‘contrarianism’ that was not always easy to distinguish from conservatism. Judt deployed great historical learning to reconsider the history of post-war Europe, though he was prone to a kind of reductive hostility in discussing left-wing intellectuals. Garton Ash has turned historically informed political analysis into a fine art, with vivid and penetrating accounts of key moments in contemporary history, though his journalism sometimes falls below the high standards of his more extended essays.

This chapter weighs the good effects and bad effects of religion, by citing examples of saints, martyrs, and terrorists. New atheism sometimes broadcasts religion variously as the cause of disorder, violence, and abuse, and as the enemy of progress, reason, and enlightenment. Christopher Hitchens cites examples of religious communities resisting vaccination programmes, refusing to admit the benefits of condoms as a barrier to infection, failing to protect children in their care, mutilating women through the ritual of female circumcision, and generally producing guilt-ridden attitudes towards sex. However, research indicates that the practice of faith is generally good for one's psychological and social well-being. For instance, a survey in the USA in 2002 of almost 500 studies in scholarly journals concludes that there is a clear correlation between religious commitment and higher levels of well-being and self-esteem, and also lower levels of hypertension, depression, and criminal activity.

This chapter investigates some basic philosophical, theological and socio-political controversies that underpin the place of faith in the public realm. It considers two relevant questions: Should religious faith have an organised presence in the public realm? What are, and what might be, the consequences of a faith presence? Specifically, the chapter addresses a strong secularist critique of ‘public religion’ in the UK. It examines the strong secularist stance of Sam Harris, A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens who strongly argued that: first, religion is irrational and at odds with science and evidence-based dialogues; second, religion is a source of conflict and division; and third, religion is oppressive and a hindrance to free speech, political democracy and personal liberty as well as a threat to neutral public secular space.

This chapter examines the paradox inherent in tackling political issues within a traditionally ‘polite’ form, authorial consciences torn between retirement and public engagement, and the recurring tendency of the essayist to attack complacent readers rather than more obvious adversaries. For some, writing under political pressure, the tactics are indirection or literary insurgency; for others, the essay form itself symbolizes the freedoms to be defended from more absolutist forms of thought. Via readings of essays by Addison, Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell, Baldwin, and Hitchens, it highlights the forgotten political agendas of declaredly apolitical essayists, while inversely emphasizing the overriding literary, autobiographical, and philosophical ambitions that dominate some of the most famously political of classic English essayists.

To recount a story about someone else living in another time or another place is not always escapist in the sense that the writer is unable to bear his immediate reality; rather, the story enables the storyteller to escape from the prison house of the self.For as long as it takes to tell the story, the storyteller is in touch with others-the characters in his story as well as the people in his audience.He is dwelling in social time.

This chapter critiques the sense of certainty of atheists in defying the fundamentalism of religion. The problem with all atheistic criticisms on religion today is that while atheists are right in decrying the “evils” of religion, their sense of certainty is fundamentalism itself. For instance, Christopher Hitchens, penned in his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything that “religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a ‘total’ solution, in which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision.” However, his argument is flawed since religious moderates have no interest in total solutions of any kind, and they severely doubt that any such solution is possible or desirable. Moreover, what Hitchens has discussed indicates another form of fundamentalism.

This chapter considers blunt naturalism more directly, as it has emerged recently in the writings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. It argues that the militant modern atheists are completely successful in their opposition to certain forms of religion—indeed, to forms that are widespread in the contemporary world. Despite this success, there are other models of the religious life that can be defended against their attacks. People whose primary religious stance is an orientation towards certain values, rather than acquiescence in particular doctrines, can be free of supernaturalistic commitments or, if mythologically entangled, committed only in a way that is excusable. The chapter's defense of these orientation models revives pragmatist themes: the importance of values in religious life and of projects undertaken in community with others for the realization of those values.

New atheists face an old problem that entangles them with their theist opponents. The fundamental cosmological question—why does the world exist?—cannot be answered in scientific terms. As questions of cause slip into infinite regress, new atheists, like the theists they resist, must posit that something simply exists: something must be granted exemption from causal reasoning. This chapter first examines new atheists’ responses to the aporia described above, then analyzes several rhetorical tropes they deploy to supplement science proper. These tropes include paralepsis, a sarcasm cluster (apodioxis, tapinosis, diasyrmus), pathopoeia, and the linked tropes of catachresis and metalepsis. Especially with the last three tropes, new atheists find themselves entangled with the religious discourse they mean to supplant.