For two decades, Jordan Hall, 52, had been on this hypercharged, neon-lit journey through the whirlwind of Web 1.0: Burning Man, Big Sur, Aspen, private islands, cross-country RV treks, the jungles of southern Ecuador. Then, in 2022, Hall and his then-girlfriend Vanessa arrived in the green, rambling, rolling Blue Ridge Mountains of westernmost North Carolina. Billy Graham country. That was where he and Vanessa stumbled on the Swannanoa Christian Church.

In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.

“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.

He was 8 when his parents split, and he followed his mother to a Hindu ashram in Oakland, California. There were trips to India; upstate New York; Miami Beach, Florida; Santa Monica, California. It never stuck.

Like his mother, Crawford, now 59, was always searching. He felt unsure of who he was or should be—how to be happy, what it meant to be a man.

In the 1990s, he was a graduate student at The University of Chicago, where he studied Greek philosophy and embraced his agnosticism—“the preferred position of modern people,” he said, half-jokingly.

“I was impressed, as a young man, with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity,” he said. The German philosopher saw religion as little more than a “slave morality”—a crutch for the weak and cowardly.

But then, in 2016, Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church, in Winnipeg, Canada, invited Crawford to give a talk about “the crisis of attention,” the subject of his latest book at the time. That’s when Marilyn Simon, a Shakespeare scholar and a church member, came into his life.

It was, he said, “the classic story you hear of conversion.”

Simon was smart and striking, Crawford said, and she was “overflowing with a kind of generous strength.” The source of that strength was her faith.

Suddenly, in this lovely, faraway church—festooned with stained-glass windows and mahogany pews and a baby grand piano and crosses dedicated to the memory of those congregants killed in the world wars—Crawford could glimpse a new future. One that included Simon. And, maybe, God.

Finally, late last year, Crawford converted to the Anglican Church. Then, in June, Crawford and Simon were married at Saint Margaret’s.

“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience,” Crawford said. “You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.” He meant God, but he also seemed to be talking about his wife.

“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.

“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”

Had Crawford heard himself saying these things in 1996, when he was still a graduate student, he would have been mystified. That was the year that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, speaking at an American Humanist Association conference, declared: “I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

The Rise and Fall of the New Atheists

For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.”

But that’s what it amounted to.

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022. By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States. A majority will comprise people of other faiths and, to a much greater extent, “nones,” meaning those who have no faith at all.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks only seemed to validate the turn against religion—pitting the secularizing West against radical Islamists whose fervor stretched back to the Middle Ages. As the British intellectual and prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens said, the attacks left him feeling not only furious and sad, but “exhilarated.”

“I thought, ‘Well, here is the enemy in as plain and clear a view as it could possibly be: theocratic fascism, disclosed in its most horrific form,’ ” Hitchens said, not long after the attack.

In 2007, Hitchens hosted a conversation about atheism at his Washington, D.C., home with three other prominent nonbelievers: Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the writer and neuroscientist Sam Harris. They filmed themselves discussing their many objections to religion and the criticisms, often barbed, lodged against them for making those objections.

Their discussion went viral. Harris later wrote a book about it, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. Not believing in God was no longer just fashionable. It was, for those on campus, for best-selling authors, for those who dominated our most rarefied intellectual spaces, the only rational position worth having.

The new atheism coincided, not coincidentally, with the rise of the internet—the apotheosis of our emerging hyper-scientific, hyperrational moment, one in which every problem could be solved, every hurdle could be overcome, every disease cured. It was only a matter of the right pitch deck and enough seed capital. “People are looking for new gods, to use a phrase of Heidegger’s, and, given our technological fetish, it would make sense if these new gods showed up as a kind of new tech,” Crawford said. “You get the gods you’re looking for.”

Now, 17 years after the four horsemen first met, Hitchens is dead. So is Dennett. Harris remains an atheist. “I don’t know if it’s a real trend,” Harris told me in an email about our current religious awakening. “Call me when people start believing in Poseidon.”

I don’t know about that, but I can tell you that the tech geniuses and media personalities and celebrities who once embodied the new atheism are rethinking what we lose when we lose religion.

Some evidence of that from just this past year:

In February 2024, podcaster Joe Rogan, in a conversation about the sorry state of America’s youth with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, said: “We need Jesus.” Not five years earlier, Rogan had hosted Richard Dawkins on his show and poked fun at Christians.

In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

In May, tech mogul Peter Thiel, who had espoused a vague spirituality and had been friends with the late French philosopher and religious thinker René Girard, came down unequivocally on the side of God. “God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

Then in July, Elon Musk—the former “atheist hero,” the king of electric vehicles and space exploration, the champion of free expression—sat down with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who has studied the intersection of religion and ideology, to discuss God. “I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Then, last month, Peterson’s book We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine was published. Peterson had always avoided saying whether he believed in a higher power. Now, sporting a jacket emblazoned with the Calvary cross, he was pushing back against the new atheists. “I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting the book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end?

Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. “The feeling”—of believing—“will vary,” Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. “Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything.”

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