Satirizing Religion: From George Orwell to the New Atheists

Abstract

During the 1930s and 40s George Orwell was a leading critic of totalitarianism. Today, public intellectuals known as New Atheists lead a charge against an allegedly rising tide of “religious fundamentalism.” This paper presents a brief comparative study of Orwell and the New Atheism. Orwell’s work of the 1940s illustrates how all writing, regardless of the author’s intention, is motivated by and cannot be divorced from its historical and political context. Whereas Orwell’s context was wartime socialism, the New Atheists are motivated by contemporary liberal democracy. The paper concludes by arguing that the liberal ideology of capitalism, which the New Atheists strongly advocate through their work, can very easily and often disguise racial prejudice with “rational” and “enlightened” discourse, which is precisely the strategy of the New Atheists in relation to the “religious fundamentalism” of Islam.