On John Gray’s ‘Seven Types of Atheism’

The religious style of politics + a contrast with my work

Yesterday while working on the book I inserted a variation of the term ‘monotheism’ into the text and immediately smiled. I knew exactly where it had come from: John Gray’s book ‘Seven Types of Atheism’ (my edition Penguin, 2019), which I had been dipping into on and off for a month or more.

‘Seven Types of Atheism’ is at least the fifth book of Gray’s that I’ve dipped into or fully immersed myself in over the years (the others I am aware of are ‘False Dawn’, ‘Post-liberalism’, ‘Straw Dogs’ and ‘The Silence of Animals’).

It’s not a stretch to say he’s been a major influence on me, hence using this concept of ‘monotheism’. It’s one that he doesn’t quite own, but that no one else seems to use with such alacrity.

The point of the word in Gray’s writing is to show how modern forms of atheism often continue Christian religious thinking in another form.

As Gray writes at one stage in this book,