Militant atheists topping best-seller lists

The time for polite debate is over. Militant atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.

Christopher Hitchens’ book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.

Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful “The End of Faith” and its follow-up, “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” struck similar themes — and sold.

“There is something like a change in the zeitgeist,” Mr. Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. “There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying.”

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books’ success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.

“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories,” Mr. Mouw said, “but it’s almost like they all had a meeting and said, ‘Let’s counterattack.’ ”

The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the United States, London and Madrid, the atheists say.

As Mr. Hitchens puts it: “Religion kills.”

The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of secular panic. Nonbelievers are finally realizing, he says, that contrary to what they were taught in college, faith is not dead.

Signs of believers’ political and cultural might abound.

Religious challenges to teaching evolution are still having an effect, 80 years after the infamous Scopes “monkey trial.” The dramatic growth in home schooling and private Christian schools is raising questions about the future of public education. Religious leaders have succeeded in putting some limits on stem-cell research.

And the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a national ban on partial-birth abortion — the first federal curbs on an abortion procedure in a generation — came after decades of religious lobbying for conservative justices.

“It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here,” said Mr. Wilson, who is debating Mr. Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has written the book “Letter From a Christian Citizen” in response to Mr. Harris. “All of this is happening precisely because there’s a significant force that they have to deal with.”

Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In a 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who say they have no particular religion.

Some say liberal outrage over the policies of President Bush is partly spurring sales, even though Mr. Hitchens famously supported the invasion of Iraq.

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