Reply To: Why I left Islam

[Simon Paynton]

I don’t know for sure, but I have read recently that evangelical Christianity did help to create New atheism in the USA, because of its hardline opposition to science, evolution, human rights etc.  But I believe the main factor was 9/11.

Atheism itself, I believe, pretty much dates back to the Enlightenment.  Of course, there have always been atheists, but it began to be respectable and mainstream then.  The French Revolution, around that time, created the first officially atheist state, I think.  So that’s the time when it really started to take off.  The Enlightenment itself seems to have beeen birthed by the UK Protestant tradition, and then secular philosophers took over.

I can’t be sure, but I think that American evangelism itself was some kind of response to both science and atheism which was taking the place of religion within US culture in the 19th century.  So in the West, there’s been some kind of historic back-and-forth between religion and atheism going back centuries.

I think that Christianity had its own “Enlightenment” which went alongside the secular one.  Certainly, it’s behaved in a much more friendly fashion overall since then.