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The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion
This book examines the misuse of history in New Atheism and militant anti-religion. It looks at how episodes such as the Witch-hunt, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are mythologized to present religion as inescapably prone to violence and discrimination, whilst the darker side of atheist history, such as its involvement in Stalinism, is denied. At the same time, another constructed history—that of a perpetual and one-sided conflict between religion and science/rationalism—is commonly used by militant atheists to suggest the innate superiority of the non-religious mind. In a number of detailed case studies, the book traces how these myths have long been overturned by historians, and argues that the New Atheism’s cavalier use of history is indicative of a troubling approach to the humanities in general. Nathan Johnstone engages directly with the God debate at an academic level and contributes to the emerging study of non-religion as a culture and an identity.
453 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 11, 2018
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August 8, 2019
This book is a long overdue critical analysis of the ways the newer crop of anti-theistic polemicists distort and misrepresent history in their attempts at making it fit their ideological narratives. Atheists like myself (and, I gather, Johnstone) have been concerned at the way non-historians like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling and other "New Atheist" activists have made blithe assertions about the history of religion, most of which are based on outdated cliches and popular misconceptions rather than any solid grasp of history. Worse, a whole generation of younger secularists are now absorbing this pseudo history and its attendant flawed historiography; thus giving a series of hoary myths and errors of fact a new lease of life.
Johnstone's monograph is detailed and scholarly, but also accessible enough that it can be used to debunk the egregious examples of New Atheist bad history that he highlights. It is a pity that Palgrave Macmillan has priced this book for the academic market, making both it and its digital edition so expensive that it is likely to put off casual readers.
For a longer analysis of this excellent book see my detailed review on the "History for Atheists" site: Review - Nathan Johnstone The New Atheism: Myth and History.
Johnstone's monograph is detailed and scholarly, but also accessible enough that it can be used to debunk the egregious examples of New Atheist bad history that he highlights. It is a pity that Palgrave Macmillan has priced this book for the academic market, making both it and its digital edition so expensive that it is likely to put off casual readers.
For a longer analysis of this excellent book see my detailed review on the "History for Atheists" site: Review - Nathan Johnstone The New Atheism: Myth and History.
April 4, 2022
An excellent writing: so informative and well-written! I've pored over it and read it in a few days. It is a powerful rebuttal of popular atheistic views of history, particularly of the historical myths propagated by New Atheism. Just some of some of the illuminative quotes that I've underlined: "Between the end of the Roman Empire and the late-twelfth century torture had fallen into disuse in Europe... Christendom owed its reintroduction not to bloodthirsty clerics, but to scientific jurists concerned to free justice from the reliance on God’s intervention and to champion human judicial competence. In both medieval Europe and modern-day America, then, societies that had abandoned torture contemplated its reintroduction as a rational necessity, but the medieval story—the one for which we know the ending— recounts the failure of rationalism to control its own offspring."(p.224)
"The average inhabitant of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries probably never saw a witch trial. The chances of the average woman finding herself formerly charged with witchcraft—and so facing execution—were minute. The fact is that there were simply too few witch trials to generate the oppressive weight on the popular consciousness that feminist, neo-pagan and secularist polemicists have liked to imagine. The population of Europe in 1600 is reckoned to have been around 100 million. Perhaps 100,000 trials for witchcraft took place across Europe in the early modern period, the majority occurring between 1560 and 1660. In many areas, it is highly probable that individual communities had no history at all of formal witch-hunting, whilst for others such histories as they had were shaped by the notoriety of events that passed into local legend precisely because they were so unusual. Even in those areas where it was most pronounced, witch-hunting was highly sporadic, never routine." (p.29)
"Before the twelfth century, as we have seen, trial proceedings revolved around the religious formulae of the oath and the ordeal forms of community justice that, in theory, placed limited
expectations upon human judicial competence. The ordeal was a resort in cases taken to be beyond earthly determination. The logic of torture was entirely different. It made no appeal to God, rather it expressed openly a confidence in the ability of humans to investigate crime and determine guilt. That torture should be considered an example of Christian man’s new-found judicial sophistication might seem repellent to us, but so it was...The term ‘inquisition’ rings sinister to us now but what developed, the medieval quaestio (inquest), expressed these ideals of progressive, self-confident and human jurisprudence... The cultural underpinning of jurisprudence continued, of course, to
be religious, but the role of supernaturalism in the court was massively reduced.Instead the inquisitorial system held to a remarkably high standard of terrestrial proof, one that disallowed as too weak many types of evidence upon which a modern jury might convict. In this lies an uncomfortable irony for the New Atheists. They would have it that medieval torture reflected the shameful credulity of a theocratic judicial system enthralled by its own fantasies. In fact, however
grotesque inquisitorial practice would become, the reasons for the adoption of torture lay in the precise opposite. As Peters has shown, it was incredulity that drove the willingness to torture." (p.294)
"But historians of the Soviet Union have shown time and again that atheist oppression did indeed exist, however much it may have become inseparable from political and economic ideologies, and however cultic Soviet utopianism may have become. Atheism, a personal and individual lack of belief in God, was to be inculcated in others, forcibly if they resisted, until it stopped being a personal matter and became a condition of society."(p.213)
"This was the anti-religious component of forced collectivisation. Atheism was inseparable from the idea of the kolkhozy and the desacralisation of the village was inherent in its creation." (p.205)
"Yet, in the Soviet Union believers found themselves otherised by aregime that sought to establish atheism as the mental norm." (p.206)
"As study after study suggests that the line between ordinary citizen and totalitarian collaborator is very fine, we seem to find more need, not less, to flatter ourselves that we would have been among the Schindlers, the Stauffenburgs and the Solzhenitsyns; that, for all its apparent ubiquity, the fine line is someone else’s problem. The New Atheist mythology of religious totalitarianism is prey to the same tendency. The atrocities of the Inquisitions, the Crusades or the witch-hunts offer most to anti-religionists when it can be assumed that they were perpetrated by people fundamentally unlike them, as an expression of some evil or madness that they could never share. So it becomes desirable to also believe that those who stood out against such crimes must have been, in some fundamental way, made differently from their contemporaries. From there it is a small step to close the polemical circle and think that the difference must have lain in their being gifted with a rationalism more like ours."(p.161)
"The assumption is that the Church endlessly fashions each generation of its clerics in ignorance and bigotry as mere ciphers of its terrible and destructive inadequacies. Individuality is conceded only to those clerics who stepped beyond the mental confines of orthodoxy"(p.154)
"No historian has any illusions about the reality of medieval torture. For all its rationalist origins, and for all its ideals of rigorous procedure, it was a brutal system open immediately to abuse. Yet historians are agreed that had the rules of torture been adhered to the great witch-hunts of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could never have occurred. They did so because in a number of jurisdictions the strict regulation of torture came to be seen as unsuited to the urgency of rooting out a terrifying threat to the community. Witchcraft came to be understood as a crimen exceptum, literally an exceptional crime so serious that the normal rules of jurisprudence did not apply. It was a development fatal to the rational principles with which the inquisitorial system of proof had been created. Large-scale witch-hunting occurred when the fear of maleficium turned into moral panic. Individual acts of harm were here understood to be the tell-tale sequels to a more fundamental spiritual and intellectual crime: that of diabolic apostasy. Where God ordained order, harmony, charity and peace, Satan pursued disorder, chaos, malice and conflict. Witches internalised these anti-values. They rejected human sentiment and fellowship, and renounced their baptism in a ritual of departure from the moral community. But more than this, witches were the conspiratorial members of a terroristic anti-society. They attacked caritas by breeding discord and disrupting community harmony. They overturned nurture through infanticide, and assaulted the family through illness, impotence and even the infliction of demonic possession. They encouraged fear through economic instability, destroying livelihoods by attacks on animals and crops. In all this, witches sought not only to victimise but ultimately to disempower Christian governance. As government and magistracy aimed to embody and protect the social order that God had ordained, witches promoted its inversion; in the words of historian, Stuart Clark, they sought a ‘regimen
of misrule’: a government of chaos, the organising principle of which—its
cardinal anti-virtue—was pure, unwavering hate. Witch-hunting, then, tended to undertaken in an atmosphere of alarm, even crisis... A crimen exceptum required exceptional methods, and witch-hunters found ample justification to abandon the rigours of the inquisitorial system when these seemed to hamper their efforts against an enemy whose motives and actions could not be assimilated into standard jurisprudence. " (p.231-232)
"The average inhabitant of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries probably never saw a witch trial. The chances of the average woman finding herself formerly charged with witchcraft—and so facing execution—were minute. The fact is that there were simply too few witch trials to generate the oppressive weight on the popular consciousness that feminist, neo-pagan and secularist polemicists have liked to imagine. The population of Europe in 1600 is reckoned to have been around 100 million. Perhaps 100,000 trials for witchcraft took place across Europe in the early modern period, the majority occurring between 1560 and 1660. In many areas, it is highly probable that individual communities had no history at all of formal witch-hunting, whilst for others such histories as they had were shaped by the notoriety of events that passed into local legend precisely because they were so unusual. Even in those areas where it was most pronounced, witch-hunting was highly sporadic, never routine." (p.29)
"Before the twelfth century, as we have seen, trial proceedings revolved around the religious formulae of the oath and the ordeal forms of community justice that, in theory, placed limited
expectations upon human judicial competence. The ordeal was a resort in cases taken to be beyond earthly determination. The logic of torture was entirely different. It made no appeal to God, rather it expressed openly a confidence in the ability of humans to investigate crime and determine guilt. That torture should be considered an example of Christian man’s new-found judicial sophistication might seem repellent to us, but so it was...The term ‘inquisition’ rings sinister to us now but what developed, the medieval quaestio (inquest), expressed these ideals of progressive, self-confident and human jurisprudence... The cultural underpinning of jurisprudence continued, of course, to
be religious, but the role of supernaturalism in the court was massively reduced.Instead the inquisitorial system held to a remarkably high standard of terrestrial proof, one that disallowed as too weak many types of evidence upon which a modern jury might convict. In this lies an uncomfortable irony for the New Atheists. They would have it that medieval torture reflected the shameful credulity of a theocratic judicial system enthralled by its own fantasies. In fact, however
grotesque inquisitorial practice would become, the reasons for the adoption of torture lay in the precise opposite. As Peters has shown, it was incredulity that drove the willingness to torture." (p.294)
"But historians of the Soviet Union have shown time and again that atheist oppression did indeed exist, however much it may have become inseparable from political and economic ideologies, and however cultic Soviet utopianism may have become. Atheism, a personal and individual lack of belief in God, was to be inculcated in others, forcibly if they resisted, until it stopped being a personal matter and became a condition of society."(p.213)
"This was the anti-religious component of forced collectivisation. Atheism was inseparable from the idea of the kolkhozy and the desacralisation of the village was inherent in its creation." (p.205)
"Yet, in the Soviet Union believers found themselves otherised by aregime that sought to establish atheism as the mental norm." (p.206)
"As study after study suggests that the line between ordinary citizen and totalitarian collaborator is very fine, we seem to find more need, not less, to flatter ourselves that we would have been among the Schindlers, the Stauffenburgs and the Solzhenitsyns; that, for all its apparent ubiquity, the fine line is someone else’s problem. The New Atheist mythology of religious totalitarianism is prey to the same tendency. The atrocities of the Inquisitions, the Crusades or the witch-hunts offer most to anti-religionists when it can be assumed that they were perpetrated by people fundamentally unlike them, as an expression of some evil or madness that they could never share. So it becomes desirable to also believe that those who stood out against such crimes must have been, in some fundamental way, made differently from their contemporaries. From there it is a small step to close the polemical circle and think that the difference must have lain in their being gifted with a rationalism more like ours."(p.161)
"The assumption is that the Church endlessly fashions each generation of its clerics in ignorance and bigotry as mere ciphers of its terrible and destructive inadequacies. Individuality is conceded only to those clerics who stepped beyond the mental confines of orthodoxy"(p.154)
"No historian has any illusions about the reality of medieval torture. For all its rationalist origins, and for all its ideals of rigorous procedure, it was a brutal system open immediately to abuse. Yet historians are agreed that had the rules of torture been adhered to the great witch-hunts of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could never have occurred. They did so because in a number of jurisdictions the strict regulation of torture came to be seen as unsuited to the urgency of rooting out a terrifying threat to the community. Witchcraft came to be understood as a crimen exceptum, literally an exceptional crime so serious that the normal rules of jurisprudence did not apply. It was a development fatal to the rational principles with which the inquisitorial system of proof had been created. Large-scale witch-hunting occurred when the fear of maleficium turned into moral panic. Individual acts of harm were here understood to be the tell-tale sequels to a more fundamental spiritual and intellectual crime: that of diabolic apostasy. Where God ordained order, harmony, charity and peace, Satan pursued disorder, chaos, malice and conflict. Witches internalised these anti-values. They rejected human sentiment and fellowship, and renounced their baptism in a ritual of departure from the moral community. But more than this, witches were the conspiratorial members of a terroristic anti-society. They attacked caritas by breeding discord and disrupting community harmony. They overturned nurture through infanticide, and assaulted the family through illness, impotence and even the infliction of demonic possession. They encouraged fear through economic instability, destroying livelihoods by attacks on animals and crops. In all this, witches sought not only to victimise but ultimately to disempower Christian governance. As government and magistracy aimed to embody and protect the social order that God had ordained, witches promoted its inversion; in the words of historian, Stuart Clark, they sought a ‘regimen
of misrule’: a government of chaos, the organising principle of which—its
cardinal anti-virtue—was pure, unwavering hate. Witch-hunting, then, tended to undertaken in an atmosphere of alarm, even crisis... A crimen exceptum required exceptional methods, and witch-hunters found ample justification to abandon the rigours of the inquisitorial system when these seemed to hamper their efforts against an enemy whose motives and actions could not be assimilated into standard jurisprudence. " (p.231-232)
April 4, 2025
След първите две глави се разпада, започва да изпада в несвързани и вербозни педантизми вместо да се придържа към една идея.
September 8, 2025
This was an uncomfortable book for me to read, but I'm glad I read it.
I would never have called myself a "New Atheist" (despite my admiration for Dawkins and Dennett's science books) but I was honestly militant, confrontational about religion and probably someone this book was written for.
Johnstone explains his reasons for the book: "This book is not a counter-polemic to the New Atheism. It is, however, a critique of New Atheist polemical methods that raises questions as to their influence on non-religion more widely. It is a defense of history, and of the humanities in general, that highlights the dangers implicit in these becoming victims of selective evidencialism in an important public debate. As such it is a work of academic advocacy. The proper respect for the humanities will have to be integral to the survival of a non-religion more reasoning than that of the New Atheists—and informed non-religion in which the crimes of faith are considered proportionately, in which its darker 'tendencies' are properly contextualised and not simply reduced to stereotypes, and in which the negative potential of atheism is acknowledged by those who would strive thereby to ensure that it is never fulfilled. In short, a non-religion built on fact rather than myth."
Johnstone also argues that, "In many cases, the New Atheists rely on words like 'Crusade', 'witch-hunt' or 'Northern Ireland' to quickly summon up powerful pre-existing images in the mind of the reader. They do not elucidate because they believe they do not have to, and the real power of their history of perennial religious malevolence is in creating the impression that we already know it. A single reference to 'the Inquisition' is worth more that a chapter of exposes of previously unfamiliar religious brutalities. History is used precisely because of the efficiency of its impact. It takes far fewer words to give voice to myths than it does to untangle fact from fiction."
This book also expanded on some other subtler criticisms of anti-theists that I'd been thinking about and had been made uncomfortable by. I'm grateful for that. One that I'd thought about was "atheist proselytism" which always seemed like it should have been impossible, but seemed to be so common. Another was the idea that "rationality" is something that religious people, by definition, couldn't have (which seemed to be obviously false, but believed nonetheless).
Johnstone's final paragraph reads: "Atheists cannot demand that the religious acknowledge the dark side of their collective past, and what is suggests about their own current potentials, without being prepared to do the same... It is only by recognizing the absolutist potential of certain forms of atheism that those who would wish to can work towards maximizing its progressiveness. The past does indeed show us what atheism can be. It is a lesson worth learning and applying to ourselves."
I think Johnstone hit the nail straight on the head in this book.
I would never have called myself a "New Atheist" (despite my admiration for Dawkins and Dennett's science books) but I was honestly militant, confrontational about religion and probably someone this book was written for.
Johnstone explains his reasons for the book: "This book is not a counter-polemic to the New Atheism. It is, however, a critique of New Atheist polemical methods that raises questions as to their influence on non-religion more widely. It is a defense of history, and of the humanities in general, that highlights the dangers implicit in these becoming victims of selective evidencialism in an important public debate. As such it is a work of academic advocacy. The proper respect for the humanities will have to be integral to the survival of a non-religion more reasoning than that of the New Atheists—and informed non-religion in which the crimes of faith are considered proportionately, in which its darker 'tendencies' are properly contextualised and not simply reduced to stereotypes, and in which the negative potential of atheism is acknowledged by those who would strive thereby to ensure that it is never fulfilled. In short, a non-religion built on fact rather than myth."
Johnstone also argues that, "In many cases, the New Atheists rely on words like 'Crusade', 'witch-hunt' or 'Northern Ireland' to quickly summon up powerful pre-existing images in the mind of the reader. They do not elucidate because they believe they do not have to, and the real power of their history of perennial religious malevolence is in creating the impression that we already know it. A single reference to 'the Inquisition' is worth more that a chapter of exposes of previously unfamiliar religious brutalities. History is used precisely because of the efficiency of its impact. It takes far fewer words to give voice to myths than it does to untangle fact from fiction."
This book also expanded on some other subtler criticisms of anti-theists that I'd been thinking about and had been made uncomfortable by. I'm grateful for that. One that I'd thought about was "atheist proselytism" which always seemed like it should have been impossible, but seemed to be so common. Another was the idea that "rationality" is something that religious people, by definition, couldn't have (which seemed to be obviously false, but believed nonetheless).
Johnstone's final paragraph reads: "Atheists cannot demand that the religious acknowledge the dark side of their collective past, and what is suggests about their own current potentials, without being prepared to do the same... It is only by recognizing the absolutist potential of certain forms of atheism that those who would wish to can work towards maximizing its progressiveness. The past does indeed show us what atheism can be. It is a lesson worth learning and applying to ourselves."
I think Johnstone hit the nail straight on the head in this book.
June 5, 2024
Nathan Johnstone's book is not a religious defense against the onslaught of New Atheism. Instead, it is a historical study of New Atheist claims and a sociological study of the movement itself.
He goes through many of their claims about religious history with essential academic rigour. Many of them I already knew to be false, like the claim that Atheism has never been used for violence and oppression. I didn't believe such myth much beyond my own "New Atheist" days. But others I found to be surprising. I didn't know there were nuances behind the witch-hunts or the inquisition. Johnstone showed that these events weren't the product of some perennially bloodthirsty religious mind. Instead they were outcomes of specific socio-political contexts. And the events themselves weren't as all-encompassing as popular history makes them out to be.
I found the last three chapters to be especially fascinating. There Johnstone points out the curious similarities that the New Atheist Movement itself has to religion. Like religion, they claim a monopoly over truth. Like religion, they consider those who reject the absolute truth to be either dumb or willfully dishonest. Some like Sam Harris engage in a discourse of "othering" and moral panic which ironically resembles the moral panic that led to the witch-hunts. Author warns that the lack of attention of the movement towards its own "religiosity" and extremist tendencies can be dangerous. It can lead to the movement turning into an agent of oppression that it accuses religions to be.
All in all, this book was an especially interesting and fascinating read. It shows the essential "human", thus flawed, nature of the New Atheist movement. Despite it's claim to science and rationality, it is not fundamentally different from traditional religions.
He goes through many of their claims about religious history with essential academic rigour. Many of them I already knew to be false, like the claim that Atheism has never been used for violence and oppression. I didn't believe such myth much beyond my own "New Atheist" days. But others I found to be surprising. I didn't know there were nuances behind the witch-hunts or the inquisition. Johnstone showed that these events weren't the product of some perennially bloodthirsty religious mind. Instead they were outcomes of specific socio-political contexts. And the events themselves weren't as all-encompassing as popular history makes them out to be.
I found the last three chapters to be especially fascinating. There Johnstone points out the curious similarities that the New Atheist Movement itself has to religion. Like religion, they claim a monopoly over truth. Like religion, they consider those who reject the absolute truth to be either dumb or willfully dishonest. Some like Sam Harris engage in a discourse of "othering" and moral panic which ironically resembles the moral panic that led to the witch-hunts. Author warns that the lack of attention of the movement towards its own "religiosity" and extremist tendencies can be dangerous. It can lead to the movement turning into an agent of oppression that it accuses religions to be.
All in all, this book was an especially interesting and fascinating read. It shows the essential "human", thus flawed, nature of the New Atheist movement. Despite it's claim to science and rationality, it is not fundamentally different from traditional religions.
October 24, 2023
An excellent critical analysis and thorough deconstruction of the antitheistic misuses of the witch hunts, inquisition, medieval heresy persecutions, and representations of atheistic Stalinisms (and the associated attempts to downplay its incredibly vicious anti-theist atheistic component).
June 8, 2023
Highly recommended!
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