Atheism May Be the World's Most Effective Force for Religious Peace

The world's monotheisms make mutually contradictory claims. At most one of them can be right, and each has spent long periods asserting that the others are not merely mistaken but damnable.

Yet they fight each other far less than they used to. Christian and Muslim leaders share platforms. Interfaith councils exist. The language of "the Abrahamic faiths" treats three incompatible systems as a family.

Something changed, and I do not think it was theology.

The Common Enemy

The straightforward explanation is that they acquired a shared opponent: unbelief.

This is ordinary coalition behaviour and there is nothing mysterious about it. Groups with incompatible aims routinely set aside their differences when facing a common threat, and the differences reappear the moment the threat recedes. What is striking here is only the scale — differences that produced centuries of war are now described as secondary, and described that way sincerely.

So atheism may be one of the more effective forces for peace in the modern world, and it achieved this without converting anyone or winning any argument. It simply changed the strategic situation.

The Second Effect, Which Is More Interesting

There is a subtler consequence, and I think it is the more valuable one.

To stand alongside a rival monotheism, you must make yourself presentable to it. And what gets discarded in that process is not chosen at random. The most absurd material goes first.

Islam's more baroque eschatology becomes something one does not dwell on in mixed company. Christianity stops mentioning that at the crucifixion the tombs of Jerusalem opened and their occupants walked into the city — a claim in Matthew that would have been front-page news if anyone else had noticed it. Judaism grows quiet about the more extravagant miracles.

Nobody discards their core. Muhammad stays, the direction of prayer stays, Moses stays. But the stupidest claims go overboard, because they are the ones that cannot be defended in front of a sceptical audience that is now permanently present.

Why This Counts as Progress

So atheism does not only pacify religions against one another. It launders them. It applies continuous pressure on each tradition to quietly abandon its most ridiculous assertions in order to remain in respectable company.

That is real improvement, and it arrives without anyone deconverting. A religion that has stopped insisting on walking corpses is a smaller, more manageable thing than one that insists on them, even if its adherents are as numerous as before.

I want to be careful not to overstate this. The core claims remain false, and the discarded material is discarded from public conversation rather than from doctrine — press a believer and much of it is still formally affirmed. This is a change in what is emphasised, not in what is believed.

But emphasis is most of what a religion does in practice. What gets preached, taught to children, and acted upon matters more than what sits unread in a creed. A doctrine nobody mentions is most of the way to a doctrine nobody holds.

The Uncomfortable Corollary

There is a conclusion here that atheists may not enjoy.

If unbelief is what drives this moderation, then the moderation depends on the pressure continuing. A world where religion faced no serious sceptical challenge would be a world where the absurdities returned — there would be no audience to hide them from.

Which means the argumentative, publicly visible, occasionally rude atheism that religious moderates find so distasteful is plausibly the thing producing the moderation they value. The pressure and the civility are the same phenomenon, and you cannot ask for one while objecting to the other.