Abstract
What unites New Atheist contributions in a single culture is their shared radical secularist critique of religion, made on philosophical or moral grounds. Discussion of New Atheism typically focuses on these intellectual aspects, attending to their coherence and impact. This chapter shifts attention from the ideal to the physical, demonstrating how New Atheism and related atheist cultural movements have impacted upon and worked through material environments. I argue that detailed analysis of the media via which New Atheist ideas are communicated reveals impacts and legacies that might otherwise be ignored. The Atheist Bus Campaign is used as a case study. This campaign has attracted much attention, focusing again on its intellectual and activist elements: the intentions behind it, the ideas expressed in it. In addition to this, however, the materiality of the campaign has shaped its impact and set its course in sometimes unexpected directions. The case of the bus campaign illustrates a broader argument that an investigation of the impact and legacy of New Atheism must look not only to its intellectual content but also to the social and cultural vehicles of that content and to their movement through time and space.
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Notes
- 1.
See Cotter (2011) for a review of the authors associated with New Atheism, as well as the particular claims of these authors to be considered of particular relevance to the movement.
- 2.
I use the term ‘non-religious’ here according to the sense developed especially in Lee 2012a, b. In this, non-religious phenomena are those which are identified in contradistinction to religion – New Atheism is generally non-religious in this sense, but so too are informal practices such as the act of declining to participate in religious traditions (see also Campbell (2013 [1971]) on such specifically irreligious acts) or less oppositional forms of otherness such as experiences of curiosity in religious culture incited by a sense of its otherness and exoticism (Lee 2015b). This model understands ‘non-theism’ in the same vein, denoting phenomena identified in contradistinction to theism, while ‘areligion’ and ‘atheism’ denote the absence of relations with religion and theism, respectively. Finally, ‘secularity’ is treated as distinct from rather than synonymous with ‘non-religion’, denoting a situation in which ‘this-worldly’ rather than existential, metaphysical concerns are uppermost; religious and non-religious cultures tend to have secular aspects in this sense, but also tend not to be wholly secular. On different senses of core terms in this field, see also Bullivant and Lee (2016).
- 3.
For example, recent controversy has surrounded a comment posted by Richard Dawkins on the social networking site, Twitter, reading, ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge’. The comment provoked a hostile response from other Twitter users and in media discussions.
- 4.
Zenk (2012, 39–40) draws the same association between the later German Atheist Bus Campaign and Neuer Atheismus in Germany.
- 5.
See BHA (2013) for full list, and Zenk (2012) for a scholarly discussion of the German case.
- 6.
I am indebted to Anna Strhan for this observation. See also Strhan’s (2012, 6–9) discussion of the bus campaign.
- 7.
See Beckford (2012) for a critical introduction to the idea of ‘postsecularity’.
- 8.
The census for England and Wales is conducted every ten years and, since 2001, has captured information concerning (non)religious affiliation. The inclusion of this question in 2001 was controversial and was included as the sole voluntary question on the census in respect of this. Compared to other large-scale surveys, the 2001 census found unusually high numbers of people associating with a religious organization—and unusually low numbers of people identifying as have no religion—and the BHA was one of several actors calling for a revision of ‘the religion question’ in the 2011 census. For further information, see Voas and Day (2007) and Day and Lee’s (2014) special issue of Religion, ‘Making Sense of Surveys and Censuses: Issues in Religious Self-Identification’.
- 9.
For a more extensive analysis of this international dimension to the bus campaign, see Tomlins and Bullivant (2016).
- 10.
Thanks to Lorna Mumford for sharing this example with me, drawn from data from her own on going research into organized non-religion in London (see Mumford 2015).
- 11.
All names are changed.
- 12.
See Cragun (2013) for an analysis of GoogleTrends data in relation to the US case.
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Lee, L. (2017). Vehicles of New Atheism: The Atheist Bus Campaign, Non-religious Representations and Material Culture. In: Cotter, C., Quadrio, P., Tuckett, J. (eds) New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54964-4_5
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