The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

The Reason for God was published in 2008 amid the background of a shifting cultural context. New trends had been gathering steam in the United States from the mid-20th century onward, espousing a more relativistic, agnostic, or even atheistic view of the world. Western Europe had seen declining rates of religious involvement throughout the 20th century, to the point where the nonreligious portion of society had gained a majority influence in the culture, and by the early 21st century, American society appeared to be following a similar trendline. Especially on the younger end of the demographic range, Americans associated themselves less and less with religious traditions, espousing agnostic and religiously unaffiliated positions instead.

These shifts were particularly evident in the publishing world in the years immediately preceding The Reason for God’s release, which saw several books that took an expressly atheistic and anti-Christian stance rocketing to bestseller status. These included The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett (2006), Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (2006), and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (2007). These authors were sometimes referred to as “the Four Horsemen of New Atheism” (a reference to the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the biblical book of Revelation). They represented a new groundswell of active and outspoken rhetoric pushing back against traditional Christian claims. Although Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God only refers to the “new atheist” authors occasionally, the timing and content of his book appear to be a response to the broader social movement that they represent.

Against a popular conception that atheism and nonbelief were in the ascendancy, however, Keller argued that that was not the full picture of what was happening in American society. The newly aggressive posture taken by atheists was not necessarily one of triumph, but rather one that showed traces of insecurity in the face of rising religious belief. Keller suggested that both sides were right, at least in part—that both devout belief and nonbelief were rising in American society—and that it was the “soft middle” of the merely nominally religious that were moving to one side or the other. Assessments of American society appear to bear out Keller’s view: Groups of avowed nonbelievers were on the rise in the early 21st century (a group often designated as the “nones” in demographic surveys), and the number of adherents to Christian groups that maintained traditional beliefs on doctrine and social matters were holding firm or rising.

The much-publicized declines in Christian affiliation tended to be clustered in denominational bodies that were more inclined to adapt to changing cultural perceptions on issues of doctrine and social practice, and not in the groups that Keller would identify as representing traditional Christian orthodoxy. Globally, as Keller argues, the picture in the early 21st century was somewhat different than the American or European trends. Across much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, religious affiliation (including, most prominently, Christianity) was not just holding firm but rising sharply, at rates not seen in most other periods of history.

As such, Keller addresses his book not so much to a Christian audience, to assuage their sense of losing ground in the shifting sands of American culture, but to a secular audience that was worried that religion was proving to hold an inextricable place in social and cultural life.