The first sense in which secularization theory was right is geographic. Western Europe followed the theory perfectly. Rates of church-going in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and France hover right around 1 to 5 percent of the population. In many surveys, fewer than 10 percent of those populations claim to believe in God. The second exception to secularization theory’s failure is among the world’s cultural and intellectual elites. Here Peter Berger has put it wonderfully. In the course of studying the relative levels of religious belief in the world’s countries, sociologists determined that the least religious nation in the world was Sweden, while the most religious was India. Berger, speaking of the United States, said that what we have in America is a nation of Indians ruled over by an elite of Swedes. As Berger has explained, the secularized global intelligentsia is in all nations a minority of the population, “but a very influential one.”¹⁸

The significance of these two exceptions is that Western Europe and the world’s cultural elites play an inordinate role in influencing the larger culture. Thus the secularization of Europe and of America’s elites has created a cultural opening for the emergence of what we are calling the New Atheism. How exactly has this opening occurred?

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Perhaps the most insightful philosopher to have considered this is Charles Taylor. His massive work A Secular Age is a bold but also rather humble and honest work.¹⁹ Taylor has given attention over the decades to the secularization of society and to what it means to live in a secular age, and he makes an argument that is very difficult to refute. Taylor’s argument is that Western history has experienced three different intellectual stages, three different sets of conditions of belief.

First, there once was a time in which it was impossible not to believe. If you move back before the Enlightenment, into the Medieval period and beyond, it was virtually impossible to find persons who did not believe in God, or who at least did not assume that belief in God was absolutely necessary in order to make sense of the world. Believing in God was crucial to understanding why the sun was there in the morning and the moon and the stars at night. God was an integral, inseparable part of society’s Weltanschauung, its worldview. It was impossible not to believe because there was no other explanation. There was no other theory, no other rival worldview that could explain all that human beings experienced.

The second phase Taylor describes is when it becomes possible not to believe. The Enlightenment becomes the great opening for this, for even though it remained, for most people, still impossible not to believe, the great epistemological turn to the subject meant that the possibility of nonbelief suddenly emerged. The individual himself became the center of meaning, and thus God was no longer understood to be the sovereign subject, but rather the object of study. And like any other theory, one could take him or leave him.