It wasn’t too long ago that being an openly atheist public figure was, more or less, simply not done, but there was a moment in the middle-aughts that forced a conversation about how religion wasn’t the unmitigated force for good it was so often assumed to be, and about the large number of good, smart people who simply didn’t believe in any of it.
That moment was the emergence of a phenomenon that came to be known as “the New Atheism,” a term popularized by journalist Gary Wolf in a 2006 Wired article profiling atheist intellectuals who had recently written books criticizing religion and religious belief, one of whom was Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett.
The New Atheists brought intellectual heft to their critiques of religion, and often an undercurrent of rage and exasperation that in the twenty-first century, human civilization was still promoting the unquestioning belief in and allegiance to Bronze Age mythologies, fictions that serve to subjugate women, silence dissent, justify violence, thwart progress, and deny reality. But where the other writers levied confrontation, Dennett offered curiosity. His 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon is not an anti-religion manifesto, but rather it is a series of questions, eloquently asked. Why did humans adopt religious beliefs? Why do we still cling to them in the age of science? What purpose does religion seem to serve? What else might fulfill its perceived functions?
It is perhaps because of this less confrontational approach that Dennett never reached the same levels of celebrity as his fellow “horsemen.” He largely agreed with the criticisms leveled at religion, but more of his energy seemed directed at understanding what was behind it, rather than merely denouncing it.
Dennett not only played a major role in normalizing atheism in the broader culture, but helped reveal to the world the prevalence of atheism among practicing clergy who felt compelled to hide their nonbelief. Dennett partnered with qualitative researcher Linda LaScola to carry out the pioneering studies on this phenomenon, which led to the establishment of the Clergy Project in 2011, an organization that provided a safe, anonymous online space exclusively for religious leaders who no longer have supernatural beliefs. In 2013, Dennett and LaScola co-authored a book on the project, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind. Stories from the Clergy Project inspired the stage play The Unbelieving, which debuted in New York City in 2022.
In contrast to his efforts to make the world more welcoming to atheists, his magnanimity did not always extend to other marginalized groups. In the last few years of his life he expressed some hurtfully regressive positions, in particular when boosting a transphobic author’s book and engaging in tropes about “self-righteous partisanship” and “bullying” on the part of trans people.
Dennett’s life’s work was, of course, about much more than being an openly atheist public figure. He was a philosopher of the mind who sought to understand and explain the workings of human consciousness and free will. He was a critic of what he saw as the postmodernist approach to truth claims, adopting the term “deepity” for an idea that seems on the surface to be profound, but is actually trivial. In his latter years, he sounded dire alarms about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. He authored more than a dozen other books including Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and his final work, the memoir I’ve Been Thinking, which was published in 2023.
Daniel Dennett died on April 9, 2024, at the age of 82.