Seven Types of Atheism

Gray's governing proposition is that modern atheism, especially the New Atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens, is not a clean break from religion but a continuation of monotheism by other means. He rejects the self-image of contemporary atheists as rational, secular, and free from myth. Instead, he argues that secular humanism is a 'hollowed-out version of the Christian belief in salvation in history,' and that the faith in science or progress that many atheists profess is itself a religious inheritance . The book's target is teleology—the imposition of purpose on a purposeless world. Gray's task is taxonomic: by mapping older, richer atheist traditions, he shows that the New Atheism is a narrow and unoriginal variant of a much broader history of unbelief.

The seven types, as the book's chapter structure indicates, are: the New Atheism (dismissed as a nineteenth-century orthodoxy); secular humanism (a sacred relic of Christianity); a strange faith in science; atheism, Gnosticism, and modern political religion; the God-haters (Sade, Dostoevsky); atheism without progress (Conrad, Santayana); and the atheism of silence (Schopenhauer, Spinoza) . Gray is explicit about his sympathies. He endorses the last two: the stoic, non-progressive atheism of Conrad and Santayana, which accepts human limitation without deifying humanity, and the mystical atheism of Schopenhauer, which acknowledges the limits of language and abandons the will to system. The first five are subjected to varying degrees of critique, with the New Atheism receiving the most dismissive treatment.

The Irish Times review describes the book as 'entertaining but troubling,' noting that Gray 'skips over counter-arguments, rather than tackling them head on' and that it is 'more of a polemical tract than a work of high scholarship' . The reviewer also observes that 'the seven types of atheism is by no means a comprehensive, or even a particularly coherent, list.' A theological critic writing for Theos challenges Gray's readings of Christian history, arguing that his claim that Jesus had 'no idea of founding a universal religion' is anachronistic and ignores the universalist strands in the Hebrew prophets that Jesus drew upon . The common thread is that Gray's taxonomy is selective, serving a pre-determined conclusion about the bankruptcy of modern atheism rather than offering a neutral map of the tradition.

Seven Types of Atheism extends the argument of Black Mass into the territory of unbelief. Where Black Mass diagnosed secular political religions—Jacobinism, Marxism, neoconservative democratization—as mutations of Christian apocalypticism, Seven Types of Atheism applies the same genealogical method to atheism itself. The chapter on 'Atheism, Gnosticism and Modern Political Religion' revisits the thesis of Black Mass directly, treating political utopianism as a form of atheist religiosity . The later book is more taxonomic and less historical, offering a map of positions rather than a narrative of how they developed. But the underlying conviction is identical: that secular modernity has not escaped religion; it has merely repressed it, and the repression produces worse symptoms than the original faith.

The chapter on 'God-haters' (type 5) serves a crucial function in Gray's taxonomy: it shows that atheism can be religious in structure even when it is explicitly hostile to God. Gray's 'greatest modern prophet' of this type is the Marquis de Sade, who did not reject theism as wishful thinking but viewed the very idea of God as evil, and who embraced cruelty as a principled response to a malevolent creator . This is not atheism as liberation from superstition; it is a negative theology, a stance defined entirely in relation to the God it denounces. By including Sade alongside Dostoevsky, Gray demonstrates that the rejection of God does not guarantee humanism, progress, or decency—and that the most vehement atheists may be the most secretly religious.