Matt and Kevin are musing over what accounts for the recent spate of books aggressively defending atheism and attacking religion. "It seems especially odd to me." writes Matt, "because it's so contrary to the spirit of non-theism to go around writing books like this. The whole strength of the non-theistic intellectual enterprise over the years has simply been to go about our business without talking about God."
You're seeing, I think, a few forces at work here. One is that the rise of the Christian Right, and particularly the post-2004 narrative that they and their worldview reelected Bush, has merged religion and politics, and it would be contrary to the spirit of politics not to go around forcefully advocating for your views. The conflation created a new situation in which atheists actually had to argue down the Christian Right, since their beliefs were now morphing into policy positions.
Another is the nascent confidence among atheists that they're maturating into a real movement with a certain amount of sway, safety, and -- for lack of a better term -- evangelical potential. I don't think, as Matt does, that atheism is traditionally taken up by those who ignore the question of God. Those folks are generally agnostics. Atheists, in my experience, tend to dislike religion with a particular intensity, blaming it -- rightly or wrongly -- for all manner of historical atrocities, modern ills, and intellectual crimes. For some time, it wasn't safe, at least occupationally, to detail those complaints publicly. As a market has emerged for such opinions, however, and the Christian Right has courted enough controversy that their beliefs have become fair game, you're seeing the public expression of this form of atheism, which is as much an anti-theism as anything else.
