Even as America welcomes its first native-born Pope, few would question that we live in a secular age. Nearly 30 percent of Americans now call themselves “religiously unaffiliated,” according to the most recent round of Pew polling data: making them the largest single religious bloc in the United States. And that number is only climbing. Among the members of Generation Z, at least a third have dispensed with religion altogether.
It might seem that the onetime “four horsemen” of the New Atheism—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris—have triumphed. Ours is an era of rationality and technocratic control, where science and engineering have given us the answers we once sought in sacred texts, or in magic, or in the stars. God is, if not dead, irrelevant.
