Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution. No longer. In the fall of 2025, it sometimes feels as if every influencer in good standing has gotten religion. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, E.J. Dionne, Peter Thiel, Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Brooks, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and husband Niall Ferguson are only the most prominent of intellectuals who have gone public with good things to say about God, ranging from vague invocations of a universal force to doctrinal Christianity.
