Atheist spirituality: a follow on from New Atheism?

Abstract

Books about well-being, self-improvement, life management and spirituality have been popular for many years. It is not news to anybody that such topics sell. However, books on atheism have never become bestsellers until the early years of the twenty-first century. Now the so-called New Atheist books have altogether sold millions. It may sound surprising, but atheism sells. It may have been the idea of a publishers’ marketing department to put the two selling points together, but in recent years a number of books about atheist spirituality, spiritual atheism and atheist self-help have been published. That has been one aspect of the increased visibility of atheism and spirituality in public discourse. Atheist discourse which is combined with ‘spirituality’ might be called ‘post-secular’ as it does not fit easily into the neat binary classification between religious and non-religious secular. This article examines this hybrid area in atheist discourse in relation to three aspects: monotheism, spirituality and meditation. Atheist discourse situates itself against monotheism, but some spokespersons combine atheism with spirituality and meditation. This works as an example of a wider and recent trend in society where a blurring of the earlier normative boundaries between religion and non-religion has become fairly common, not necessarily in terms of beliefs, but of practices. Even though there is a long tradition of non-theistic and atheistic readings of Buddhism, for example, they have rarely been combined with an explicit criticism of monotheistic traditions and atheist consciousness-raising.