A half century ago, Christianity Today printed an editorial titled “The New Christians,” which followed a movement known as the Jesus Revolution. These young “counter-culture converts,” as the article dubbed them, held emotionally charged notions of the Christian experience.

Yet despite the positive vibes associated with this emerging band of new believers, the editorial noted that the chief criticism leveled against them was that they seemed to exhibit a “super-subjective trust” and lacked a “substantial apologetic.” This was cause for concern, it was felt, since the Christian faith required “cognitive knowledge” to ground one’s “subjective experience.”

Fast forward 50 years, and a new religious movement seems to be underway, perhaps just as offbeat as the Jesus People of the 1970s. I am talking about the growing number of “intellectual Christians”—people whose turn to faith is tethered far more to cognitive knowledge than to subjective experience.
The general cultural trend on the ground is still shifting away from Christianity—most easily recognized by the exponential rise of the “nones.” But a curious trend is taking place among the elite, as a growing number of high-profile thought leaders and public figures are repudiating their antireligious paradigms in favor of the Christian framework.

Consider, for example, A. N. Wilson, an Oxford graduate and former classmate of Richard Dawkins who had developed a reputation as a cerebral writer with a bone to pick with believers. The self-described atheist shared his misgivings in his 1991 book Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. But in 2009, Wilson shocked his friends and colleagues by penning a New Statesman article titled “Why I believe again.” Some may try to live without religion, Wilson declared, but he could not.

A noted author and researcher, Wilson had read biographies of people who spent their lives serving the poor and outcasts because of their faith. “I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God,” he wrote. This reminded him, he said, “of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist.”

“Human beings are very much more than collections of meat,” he concluded. Our humanity toward one another, along with the languages of love and music, convinced Wilson “that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

Nearly a decade later came Tom Holland, an award-winning British author and ancient Greek and Roman historian. At some point in his studies, Holland recognized the difference in values held by the ancient world compared to those he held instinctively. He realized Christianity is the reason we take for granted that it is better to bear suffering than to cause it—and why we assume all human life is equal in value.

As an avowed atheist throughout his adult life, Holland shocked fellow academics in 2016 when he too penned an article in the New Statesman titled “Why I was wrong about Christianity.” And while he may not yet consider himself a believer in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, he confessed he has lost faith in the secular narrative, returned to church, and “surrendered to the truth” of the stories in Scripture (such as the Exodus), whether they are ultimately historical or mythical.

When it came to his morals and ethics, Holland said, he learned to accept he was “thoroughly and proudly Christian”—a realization he boldly underscored in a later interview with British historian Dan Snow: “I have come to the conclusion that, essentially, I am Christian.”

Former New Atheist thinker Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a similar turn just last year. As a research fellow at Stanford University and a Muslim, Ali was once described by Christopher Hitchens as “the most important public intellectual probably to come out of Africa.” But in 2023, she professed in her essay “Why I am now a Christian” (apparently a play on Bertrand Russell’s famous 1927 essay) that her desire and search for a unifying basis for belief in the humanitarian values of life, equality, freedom, and dignity ultimately led her to the Christian faith.

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“The only credible answer,” Ali said, “lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” She appreciated not only its focus on the intellectual status of humanity but also its “compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.” In answer to those looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, Ali was compelled to admit that “Christianity has it all.”

Such intellectual conversion stories are not new. My own doctoral supervisor at Cambridge—Janet Martin Soskice—converted in college precisely because of Christianity’s intellectual satisfaction. Philosopher Edward Feser returned to the Catholicism of his youth for the same reason. But this trend seems to have increased exponentially in recent years, with a growing number of secular intellectuals making similar declarations.

What does this phenomenon reveal about the changing cultural climate in the past 15 years? I believe it signals a significant pendulum swing—due in part to apologetic groundwork laid by previous generations.

In the early part of the 20th century, philosophy professors began announcing that the problem of evil was a final death knell for an antiquated Christian religion. The problem of pain and suffering—including because of “man’s inhumanity to man”—simply could not be accounted for under the reign of an all-powerful and all-loving God.

Instead, these academics argued, philosophy could offer an anthropocentric ethic that did not require appealing to the heavens. Epicurus first made this argument; David Hume systematized and popularized it; and professors told their students it was a settled conclusion.

Scholars began to argue that religion was merely a tool for repression and oppression—as many wars in history could attest—and that the morality of secular humanism could stand independent of such constraints. They promoted a hopeful idealism that if we could just give libertarian freedom full authoritative power, all would be well in the world.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s—with those decades’ extreme focus on individualism, sexual freedom, and social liberation—the search for some replacement of religion (usually in politics) was in full swing. And what did this perspective pass on to the next generation? Those growing up in the ’80s and ’90s found their answer in the nihilism of Seinfeld and classroom debates about whether the Nuremberg trials would have occurred if they were held in our own time. And the “death of God” movement—along with its secular moral standard—now roamed outside the halls of academia and entered the public square.

But a funny thing happened on the road to nihilism. At many intellectual institutions, the wind had already begun to blow in the opposite direction. In the late 1960s, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga provided his classic free-will defense for the problem of evil, and in the late ’70s, Richard Swinburne began his trilogy on the philosophy of theism.

Before 1970, generations of philosophy students were fully expected to graduate from departments headed by atheists where belief in God was conspicuously absent. Yet a decade later, Time ran a story suggesting a quiet philosophical coup had taken place: Theistic arguments for God were making a modern comeback, and reports of God’s death turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

It seems many of the bright philosophers graduating from eminent programs and taking positions in prominent universities were—shockingly—theists. And many of them were Christians, bringing their intellectual powers to bear on the apologetic front. These scholars were slowly making inroads among the intelligentsia, and their influence was trickling down into the public square.

Soon, Christian philosophers were not only well-respected academics in their field but chairs of their departments. The early members of this class of faith-led scholars gave way to later members who carried the banner even further—such that by the 2000s, Christian philosophy of religion had become a powerful force to be reckoned with in the academy.

All of this was either noted or anticipated nearly a half century ago, and it was only a matter of time before we would begin to see the corresponding cracks in secular philosophy emerge. A time, for example, like now.

What exactly is happening in the realm of philosophy today? At an institutional level, atheism has long been showing signs of wear, as the death of the New Atheism movement attests. And for those like Wilson, Holland, and Ali, the foundation of secular humanism itself seems to be crumbling.

It was always a shaky foundation to begin with, both in theory and in practice, but it further fractured as generations of atheists and agnostics awaited the advent of a humanist idealism that never materialized. Instead, the problems intrinsic to a reductionist, naturalistic, materialistic outlook began attracting more and more attention. And now, even prominent skeptics are weighing secularism in the balance and finding it wanting.

The burning question throughout most of my academic research has been centered on the nature of human rights: What makes humans so special, and why should we respect values like freedom and equality?

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The answer, I believe, is found in the theological roots of human dignity and its ramifications for Western culture. Our charters claim to value all people as free and equal, yet we have often neglected the deeper spiritual truths behind these claims.

Consider the fundamental understanding of human rights adopted by much of the developed world, which carries vast ethical implications for our social and legal systems. One monumental claim of these new Christians is that desirable social values—such as love for neighbor, religious toleration, and human flourishing—have no credible standing without an objective moral foundation. The Christian understanding of humanity’s relationship to God as both creator and moral lawgiver provides such a premise.

In my own research, I found a striking similarity in the arguments of two seemingly odd bedfellows—John Locke and Peter Singer. Singer, an atheistic utilitarian, has been pushing the logic of scientific naturalism to its ultimate conclusion. He argues there is no such thing as an inherent privileged set of rights or dignity that applies exclusively to human beings. After all, humans differ from other animals only by degree, and so ethics for nonhuman creatures must be placed on equal or even superior footing to some members of our own species.

Three centuries earlier, Christian philosopher and legal theorist John Locke argued for a moral community of equals—involving those “of the same species and rank”—though he was quick to say our categories are often arbitrary and admit exceptions.

Locke and Singer both agree that without appealing to transcendence there simply is no objective standard for human dignity and equality. It is for this reason Locke made his philosophical appeal from a Christian starting point. This allowed him to acknowledge the distinct value of human life in a way Singer could not.

Still, many have tried to maintain the Christian concept of human rights apart from its religious foundation. For instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—adopted by the United Nations in 1948—reads that all humans are “born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Yet the charter provides not one syllable of defense for why we should believe such a statement is true.

The same can be said of many other organizational charters and humanitarian statements that appeal to a shared moral instinct yet fail to ground that instinct in reasoned argument. The ones that do construct a philosophical foundation have little choice but to appeal to a transcendent source for morality: a divine Creator who teaches us to value humans as he does.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence asserts, “that all men are . . . equal.” This sentence would sit alongside most modern declarations with little contradiction. But a very important word was supplied by an earlier generation out of moral necessity: created. Human beings are “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights that only by virtue of them being granted by the Creator can be considered “unalienable,” including the rights to life and liberty.

Writing in 1991, Louis Pojman claimed that by upholding human dignity as a modern humanitarian value, “we are living off the borrowed interest of a religious metaphysic.” More recently, Benjamin Vincent argued this is still true for our generation. Today, postmodernist relativism is being replaced with metamodernism’s “new ethical absolutism”—which cherry-picks moral principles apart from their larger ideological foundations.

As our recent intellectual converts bear witness, the concepts of equality and justice used to advance various social causes in the ’60s, ’70s, and today
have always been rooted in far more than collective intuition. And while enjoying a tree’s fruit while spurning its roots is possible in practice, it requires accepting the cognitive dissonance of an incoherent worldview.

Perhaps this is why Wilson, Holland, Ali, and others like them grew tired of upholding this charade—and why so many of them are now choosing to embrace Christianity as a package deal rather than parceling out its humanitarian values a la carte.

In Christian circles, such long-awaited intellectual triumph provides reason for much rejoicing—but that’s not to say there is no cause for critique.

This is especially true in the case of Holland and others who may not have publicly professed a personal faith yet still consider themselves “essentially” Christian. After all, even Richard Dawkins, arguably the leader of the New Atheist movement and still an avowed atheist, has begun to call himself a “cultural Christian.”

Many have questioned the motivations behind these cultural conversions to Christianity, and some believers see it as a dangerous threat to the real thing. Secular cultural commentator Fredrik deBoer denounces the recent trend as a “Jonathan Haidt-style embrace of consequentialist religion,” or “belief in belief,” rather than a sign of genuine belief.

This is a matter worthy of our consideration. How do we distinguish between those who have fully assented to the truth of Christianity and those who have merely adopted it as a sociopolitical tool or cultural accessory? Can Christian culture be considered “Christian” if it’s divorced from actual faith in Christ? Should we celebrate or condemn those who appreciate the results and benefits of Christianity without accepting its creeds?

Yet even those who have made declarations of belief are scrutinized. Some argue intellectual assent is not enough to signal confessional faith, particularly in evangelical circles, explains Daniel K. Williams for CT, where a significant emphasis is placed on the experiential element of being “born again”—and any conversion that lacks this “feeling” is often cast into doubt.

Christianity has historically suffered from an unfortunate dichotomy between cognitive knowledge and subjective experience. On one hand, emotions can be fickle or even deceiving, and it is helpful to recognize the truth of Christianity even when our subjective experience leaves much to be desired. On the other, we must not weaken (or worse, abandon) the subjective element of a holistic faith.

A person’s conversion to faith is no less valid for seeming to lack a corresponding emotional response, since ecstatic experience is not a biblical requirement for salvation. Still, it would not be helpful simply to shift from one imbalance to another—from the super-subjective emphasis of the Jesus People to an overemphasis on cognitive knowledge devoid of feeling.

Ultimately, only time will tell whether this growing “New Christian” movement is merely a superficial cultural shift or whether stories of those like Wilson, Holland, Ali, and others represent a real and enduring return to God among society’s intellectuals.

In the meantime, perhaps there is room for a generous reading of this religious countercurrent to the massive wake left by the nones and dones. We must all start somewhere in our journey of faith, and every seed contains great potential for growth. As O. Alan Noble wrote for CT, “I see the real risks of cultural Christianity. But I believe unbelievers who are first attracted by the benefits, not the gospel, may yet stumble into the faith.”

Much good can be done, and has been done, in countries and cultures still living off the “borrowed interest” of the Christian metaphysic. And perhaps the same can be said of those still searching and reaching toward the light of truth. We might celebrate those being drawn away from secular atheism and into a humble appreciation for the flourishing Christianity has brought into our world—and pray that it ultimately points them to the one who inaugurated it.

Surely, we can join these intellectual admirers of Christianity in affirming the virtues of our Savior’s teachings and the blessings of emulating them. For even in his own time, Jesus declared that “whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40).

And to those who continue to seek out the goodness of Christ, perhaps we may echo his own encouragement and say, “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (Mark 12:34). In a world that is growing increasingly non-Christian, I find this to be good news after all.

Nathan Guy is associate professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics and serves as the executive director of the David E. Smith Healthcare Ethics and Human Dignity Initiative at Harding University. He is the author of Finding Locke’s God.

This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The 'New Christian' Era".

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