Everyone old enough to remember that day knows where they were

and what they were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001, the day of madness that marked the true beginning of the 21st century. As the world watched in a mixture of horror and incomprehension, nineteen Islamist terrorists flew planes into American landmarks. United Airlines flight 93, reportedly intended to hit the U.S. Capitol building, crashed instead in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers wrested control of the plane from the hijackers.

No doubt the 9/11 atrocities facilitated the emergence of the New Atheists, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who collectively wrote “blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion…that succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers.” An international audience, dumbstruck with horror at the sight of a passenger plane exploding into one of the Twin Towers and watching the Towers’ resulting collapse, was at last prepared to hear some unpleasant truths: “The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority—almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against and ignored.”1 Could the same sort of religious extremists who planned and executed 9/11 acquire a nuclear weapon or explode a “dirty bomb” in a major city? A belated awareness began to spread: religion could pose an existential threat.Post 9/11, skepticism went on the offensive and its voice was finally heard.

In 2002, a series of detonations in another American city left the public in shock. This time the city was über-Catholic Boston and the thunder came from a series of explosive reports by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. What began as an investigation of a single priest rapidly widened into revelations of scores of cases in which serial child molestation by clergy had been covered up, often abetted by the collusion of police investigators, judges, and psychiatrists. The results were dramatic: “Within two years of the first of the Globe’s 800 articles on the scandal appearing in January 2002…Cardinal Law had resigned, 150 priests in Boston stood accused of sexual abuse, more than 500 victims had filed abuse claims, and church-goers’ donations to the archdiocese had slumped by 50%.” As time passed, hundreds more cases of clerical sexual abuse surfaced in other American cities as well as in Canada, Germany, Poland, Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. Michael Paulson, a Globe religious affairs reporter, noted, “And I think there was a kind of evolution of culture, a moment in history when people were willing to talk critically about religion. Often in the past that just hasn’t been possible.”