Something has shifted, though not in the way a headline might suggest. Justin Brierley, who hosted debates between Christians and atheists on the show Unbelievable? for 17 and a half years, argues that the loud, mocking atheism of the early 2000s has faded. In its place he sees a new openness to God, driven less by fresh arguments than by a hunger for meaning that secular life has left unfed. Whether that hunger leads anyone to faith depends heavily on what the church puts in front of the people who feel it.
That last point carries most of the weight in this piece. A cultural mood is not a conversion. And a mood observed from one place, in one period, does not automatically describe every community.
What exactly is being claimed?
In his book and podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Brierley traces the rise and fall of what became known as new atheism. He also points to a newer conversation in which some secular intellectuals speak about God in positive ways, even when they do not believe themselves.
He does not claim that atheism has disappeared or that churches are suddenly full. His observation is narrower and more interesting. The confident, public version of unbelief that once seemed like the future has lost its cultural force. It survives “in certain corners of the internet,” in his phrase, but it is no longer the movement it was 15 or 20 years earlier. Meanwhile, the questions it tried to dismiss have come back.
It also matters where Brierley is standing. He speaks mainly from the United Kingdom, where the influence of Christianity has been waning over many generations. For many people there, atheism is simply the default. They might not use the word, but they hold no religious belief and fell into that position rather than choosing it. When he describes a rebirth of belief, he is describing movement within a deeply secular setting.
Why did the loudest atheism fade?
Brierley defines new atheism by its tone more than its content. It was “a lot more public, a lot more dogmatic. It was not afraid to use ridicule when it came to critiquing religion.” He names Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, the so-called four horsemen, along with an online movement that grew up around their bestselling books. For a season, calling yourself an atheist felt edgy and cool.
He gives two reasons for the decline. Internal conflicts helped the movement unravel, though he does not detail them. The deeper reason is that it “ultimately didn’t answer people’s questions,” and the question it could not answer was about purpose.
If the universe came from nowhere and is heading nowhere, meaning is something you have to invent for yourself. Brierley thinks that is far harder to live than to argue. “I don’t think we are made to kind of live in a kind of do it yourself story,” he says. People sense that life has a beginning, a middle and an end, and that they have a part in something bigger than themselves. A worldview that denies such a story can still win a debate. On his account, it loses the argument people have with their own experience.
His most prominent example is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born writer and former politician who once shared stages with Dawkins and Harris. Brierley recounts that she wrote a widely shared essay, Why I Am Now a Christian. Some of her reasons, as he summarizes them, were cultural and political: secular humanism seemed to her too weak a defense against threats she saw in the world. But she also came to find that atheism gave her too little reason for living, and those questions never went away.
Is one famous conversion really evidence of a trend?
No, and the objection deserves a straight answer. A single public conversion proves only that one person changed her mind. Cultural moods also rise and fall. A skeptic could fairly say that new atheism had its moment, faded, and could return in another form.
Brierley does not rest his case on numbers in this conversation. He offers the judgment of a long-time observer who keeps meeting people who tried to build a life on science and reason alone and found it was not enough. “I just feel like something’s changed in the atmosphere,” he says. That is an honest description of what his evidence is: a sense formed over years of hosting these debates, not a measurement.
Read carefully, his argument concerns a fault line more than a trend line. The weakness he identifies is structural. If atheism cannot supply meaning, its appeal will always lean on things outside it, such as novelty, social status or anger at religion. When those fade, the unanswered question remains. That claim can be tested in conversation with real people, whatever the surveys show in a given year.
Does this story describe the Black community?
Here the “comeback” headline needs careful translation. Lisa Fields put the question to Brierley from a different starting point. She noted that “atheism is not a prominent thing in the African American community, but it is growing.” That sentence describes a very different situation from the one Brierley sees in Britain.
In Brierley’s setting, belief has been fading for generations, so any return looks like a rebirth. In the setting Fields describes, belief never became the minority position, yet unbelief is gaining ground. The direction of travel runs the other way. A story about belief making a comeback can mislead a community where belief never left but where more people are now walking away from it.
That difference should shape how the evidence is read. Black skeptics do not necessarily follow the path of British secularists, and they do not all leave faith for the same reasons. Brierley himself warns against treating every atheist the same. Some he meets left after a bad experience of religion. Some are open to God but doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. For others the problem of evil is the main obstacle.
What may carry over is the underlying question. A person raised in the church who now doubts it still has to answer what is the purpose of life. Leaving a tradition removes one answer to that question while leaving the question itself in place.
If people are less religious, where is the hunger going?
This may be Brierley’s most useful observation. Secularization has not produced a mass conversion to scientific, rational atheism. He cites a saying he attributes to G.K. Chesterton: when people stop believing in God, they become capable of believing anything.
“People aren’t any less religious,” he says. “They just kind of get religious about different things.” Some turn to Eastern and New Age spirituality, a bit of this and a bit of that. Others give themselves to politics, ideology or a social cause. Something always takes the place of God, because people have to make sense of life somehow.
He is careful here, and the care matters. Political activism is not the problem. The problem comes when a cause becomes ultimate: “if that is your God, it will let you down and you will become a very unhappy person because in that religion, there’s no grace.” A movement can demand everything from its followers. When they fail it, all it can do is cast them out.
This changes the question a Christian should ask. Most people already have a faith of some kind. The live issue is what that faith can bear. Can it carry failure? Can it carry suffering? Can it give someone a reason to keep going when the cause stalls or the movement turns on its own members?
What does Christianity offer that a substitute cannot?
Suffering is where Brierley thinks the difference shows. Some people reject Christianity because they cannot reconcile pain with a loving God. Rejecting God, though, does not remove the pain. It only declares the pain meaningless, which may settle the problem intellectually without touching it at the level of experience. As he puts it, “atheism says, you are basically alone.” Christianity names suffering a great evil and promises its redemption, because “there’s a God who knows what it is to suffer who’s came with you into your suffering.”
Lisa Fields put the same point in personal terms. God does not skip past the process of suffering; he suffers with us, and “what gives us hope is a suffering savior.” Hebrews 4:15 makes the claim directly: “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” The writer is urging struggling believers to approach God with confidence because Jesus knows human weakness from the inside. The verse promises a companion in suffering, not a date when it will end.
The obvious reply is that many secular people suffer deeply and still live with courage, love and purpose. They grieve, care for others and find their lives worth living without believing anyone suffers alongside them. That is true, and Brierley’s argument does not deny it.
What his claim shows is narrower. He is not saying atheists cannot find meaning. He is saying the atheist account of reality does not supply it. On a strictly materialist view, purpose, justice and right and wrong are inventions, useful ways of getting on in life. A secular person who lives meaningfully through grief is drawing on convictions about love and worth that their worldview treats as human constructions. Whether that is a stable place to stand is the real question. His evidence, the testimonies of people like Hirsi Ali who found it unstable, shows that some people cannot stay there. It does not show that no one can.
The same logic governs his answer to the old charge that faith is a crutch. He accepts the charge. A crutch is exactly what a broken leg needs, and he describes himself as a broken person who cannot live on his own power. “It’s not a failing to need a savior. It’s actually just the way we are made.” The objection only stings if self-sufficiency is the human ideal. Brierley’s wager is that most people eventually discover it is not, and he reads rising anxiety and depression among young people, despite all our technology, as one sign of it. That reading is his interpretation of the moment, and a skeptic could point to other causes. The underlying claim stands on its own: no amount of knowledge has made human beings able to forgive themselves.
How should the church meet this hunger?
Brierley sees the openness especially in younger people, who he believes have been starved of meaning, purpose and identity. “They’re really confused about who they’re meant to be.” He sees an open door for the church, “if we can get this right, if we can get over our tribalism and politicization and everything else that does exist.”
That condition is the heart of the matter. A generation hungry for meaning will not be fed by the same partisan loyalties it has already watched fail. If the church offers a political identity with Christian language attached, it offers one more substitute god, with no more grace than the rest. The kingdom of God has to be visibly larger than any party program, or seekers will reasonably conclude the church is selling the same thing they already have.
It also means preparing for the right conversation. “Sometimes we’re caught answering the questions of a previous generation,” Brierley warns. Christians trained to rebut the four horsemen may find the person in front of them is not hostile at all, just searching. Answering mockery with mockery was a mistake even in the new atheist years; with a searching person it is worse than useless. And if a tide of meaning-seeking millennials and Gen Z is coming, “then we need to be real.”
Being real includes giving up a defensive habit. Early in his years hosting Unbelievable?, Brierley assumed the whole burden of proof sat with the Christian. He came to see that it is “just as important to ask the questions of an atheist about how they make sense of life on their worldview as it is for them to be able to ask the Christian.” That shifts the conversation from interrogation to comparison: which story makes better sense of meaning, morality and a universe that seems set up to produce us? It also lowers the bar for ordinary believers. Many feel outmatched by skeptics who know more science than they do. Fields answered that fear directly. When the question is why we exist, “But you do have something to offer.”
Scripture shows one way of meeting religious hunger without flattering it or despising it. In Acts 17, Paul stands in Athens surrounded by idols and tells the Athenians, “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). Luke is describing what Paul did, not handing down a script. Still, the move is instructive. Paul takes their searching as evidence of a real need, and then he names the God they have not known.
Brierley frames the church’s own history the same way. “The story of the church, again, is just a story of something that keeps on dying, but keeps getting reborn again,” he says, because its God died and was raised. If he is right, today’s hunger is less an opening for better marketing than a test of whether the church still lives by the story it tells. People searching for grace will know quickly whether they have found it.
