Atheism

Atheism is the absence of belief in God or gods. It ranges from the quiet non-belief of the indifferent to the militant anti-theism of campaigners who regard religion as a social evil to be argued out of existence. The conservative quarrel with atheism has rarely been a quarrel about metaphysics. From Edmund Burke onward, conservatives have asked a different question: what happens to a society’s morals, institutions, and self-restraint when the religious roots that grew them are cut?¹

That question gained urgency in the twentieth century, when explicitly atheist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia compiled records of repression unmatched in history, and it persists today as church attendance collapses across the Western world.

Key Takeaways

• Atheism denies the existence of God; secularism, a separate concept, concerns the institutional separation of church and state.
• Philosophical scepticism about religion runs from Lucretius in the first century BC through David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) to the “New Atheism” of the 2000s.²
• Friedrich Nietzsche warned in The Gay Science (1882) that the death of God would eventually bring down the moral order built upon Him — a prediction conservatives cite to this day.³
• Conservatives distinguish private unbelief, which they accept, from public projects to strip religion out of law, education, and culture, which they resist.

History And Context

Organised disbelief is older than Christianity. Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura presented a universe of atoms without providence in the first century BC. But modern atheism took shape in the Enlightenment. David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, subjected the argument from design to a criticism so thorough that natural theology never fully recovered.² The French philosophes — Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius — turned scepticism into a programme, and the French Revolution briefly attempted de-Christianisation by decree, closing churches and erecting a Cult of Reason in 1793.

The nineteenth century produced atheism’s two most consequential thinkers. Karl Marx classed religion as the opium of an oppressed people, an illusion to be dissolved by revolution. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science (1882), announced through his parable of the madman that God was dead, that European civilisation had killed Him, and that the moral furniture of that civilisation could not stand indefinitely on a demolished foundation.³ The twentieth century tested these ideas at scale: the Soviet Union’s League of Militant Atheists demolished churches and executed clergy from 1925 onward, and state atheism became official doctrine from East Berlin to Phnom Penh. In the West, unbelief advanced by persuasion instead. The “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett dominated bestseller lists after 2004, with Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) selling in the millions.⁴

The Conservative Position

The conservative case does not depend on settling the existence of God. Burke argued in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that religion is the basis of civil society and that man is by constitution a religious animal; strip the established faith away, he warned, and some crude, violent superstition will rush into the vacuum.¹ The Jacobin Terror followed within three years, and conservatives have read it as confirmation ever since.

Three claims follow. First, morality is institutional, not self-sustaining: habits of honesty, fidelity, and restraint were formed by centuries of religious practice, and Nietzsche was right that they cannot be presumed to survive their source indefinitely.³ Second, religion is a load-bearing wall of civil society — the parish, the charity, the church school — and its decline transfers those functions to the state, enlarging it. Third, the historical record of officially atheist states is an empirical warning: regimes that abolished God claimed for themselves the authority God once limited. Tocqueville’s observation about America completes the argument: religion there restrained democratic appetites precisely because it stood apart from government, doing voluntarily what European states attempted by force. Conservatives accordingly defend public expressions of faith, church schools, and religious charities — not because every conservative believes, but because these institutions discipline power and form citizens. A significant minority of conservatives are themselves unbelievers who hold exactly this position; the political theorist John Gray, no theist, has spent two decades arguing that secular humanism is Christianity’s heir living off its inherited capital.

Differing Positions

Atheists answer on two fronts. Philosophically, they hold that the truth question is prior to the utility question: if the evidence for God fails, as Hume’s Dialogues argued, then building public institutions on a falsehood is itself a harm, whatever its social convenience.² Dawkins presses the point that teaching children doctrines as fact, before they can assess evidence, wrongs them regardless of outcomes.⁴ Empirically, they note that the most secular societies on earth — Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Japan — rank among the most orderly, trusting, and charitable, which sits poorly with the claim that morality collapses without faith. The totalitarian objection, they add, conflates atheism with Marxism-Leninism: Stalin’s regime persecuted believers in service of a rival total ideology, not of unbelief as such, and no atheist philosopher’s programme was being implemented in the Gulag.

Conservatives reply that Scandinavian order is the residue of a thousand years of Christian formation, not a refutation of it — the experiment of raising the third secular generation is still running, and birth rates, loneliness statistics, and institutional decay are early returns.

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Penguin Classics, 1986).
2. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; Oxford World’s Classics, 1993).
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882; Vintage, 1974), §§108–125.
4. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006).