“What is man?” So urgent is the question of man that the question of God has re-emerged among our intellectual and cultural leaders. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, Paul Kingsnorth, and Russell Brand have all recently professed faith. Tom Holland and Elon Musk have commented on the importance of Christianity to culture. Most surprisingly, Richard Dawkins has claimed the mantle of “cultural Christian,” though he subsequently assured the world that reports of his spiritual evolution had been greatly exaggerated.
This development is not unprecedented. In 1950, Partisan Review ran a series titled “Religion and the Intellectuals.” The authors included Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, John Dewey, Robert Graves, A. J. Ayer, Sidney Hook, and Paul Tillich. The editors’ introduction could describe our own moment:
One of the most significant tendencies of our time, especially in this decade, has been the new turn toward religion among intellectuals and the growing disfavor with which secular attitudes and perspectives are now regarded in not a few circles that lay claim to the leadership of culture. There is no doubt that the number of intellectuals professing religious sympathies, beliefs, or doctrines is greater now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that this number is continually increasing or becoming more articulate. If we seek to relate our period to the recent past, the first decades of this century begin to look like decades of triumphant naturalism; and if the present tendency continues, the mid-century years may go down in history as the years of conversion and return.
That last claim now looks wide of the mark. As significant as that revival of elite sympathy for religion might then have seemed, it did not initiate a long-term change in the overall direction of the West or the cultural fortunes of Christianity. Read More»
Carl Trueman | “Toward a New Humanism” | October 2, 2025
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