George Orwell’s 1984 defines the booming genre of dystopian literature, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World provided a more accurate prophecy of the future. In another of his works, Ends and Means, Huxley offered deep insights into why people choose to become atheists. In a time when 26 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, and the number of atheists and agnostics in the U.S. has doubled in the last 10 years, people of faith must pay heed to his observations. Huxley wrote that he and “most of [his] contemporaries” saw atheism’s moral vacuum as their “instrument of liberation,” because it allowed them to embrace sexual hedonism and socialism. For most however, the transference of faith is not so coldly transactional as it was for Huxley. Instead, faith in the transcendent gets crowded out by faith in socialism’s utopian promise of equality-of-outcome on earth. This path transformed Michael Harrington from a daily communicant volunteering in the Catholic Worker movement to the atheistic founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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