I went through these phases where I struggled with the question: outside of Mormonism, who am I? What do I believe in? What are my moral standings? What are the things that I want to support, and what are the things that I don’t want to support? I don’t think I’m alone in this.
The other day I was looking at my page for reading recommendations. And as I was looked through my reading list, it hit me: every single book I was suggesting to people, (and nearly every single book I had read since leaving the church) was tied directly to Mormonism. And honestly, that bothers me a little bit... I've been keeping myself in a box.
I’ve come to identify as an agnostic atheist. But here’s one of the things that’s been bothering me. When I introduce myself as an atheist, usually online, people react in ways that don’t feel accurate to me. Someone finds out that I left the church and asks, “Okay, well what do you believe now?” And I’ll say, “I’m an atheist.” Immediately I get mixed responses.
Some people say, “Oh, well, because you left Mormonism, now you’re just angry at God.” And I think, hang on—that’s quite the assumption. I don’t think I’ve ever felt angry at God. I’ve felt angry at religion, yes, but does being an atheist automatically make me someone who’s angry at God? That doesn’t feel right.
Then there are all the stereotypes that come with the word “atheist.” People project their ideas of atheism onto you and make assumptions about who you are as a person. And I know that’s not unique to atheism. Every single person has some sort of stereotype attached to them—whether you’re a man, a woman, Black, white, whatever your sexual orientation, marital status, or background is. But when it’s something that matters to you, those stereotypes sting more.
As someone who has walked away from religion and started identifying as an atheist, it hurts when people don’t understand that atheism isn’t one-size-fits-all. We don’t all have the same perspective of the world. We don’t all share the same approach to morals or moral understanding. But the problem is that I don’t always have a way to portray that.
Looking at my book list, I realized I really need to branch out. I need to read things that are broader, things that can expand my understanding of the world outside of Mormonism. I need to get myself out of that Mormon box and try to build up my understanding of the world as a whole.
That’s not to say I’m no longer interested in Mormon literature. I still am. I still plan to read plenty of Mormon or ex-Mormon critical material. A lot of people have sent me great recommendations, and I’m grateful for that. But I wanted to stretch beyond it.
So I started branching out. One of the first books I picked up was Good Without God by Greg Epstein. (affiliate link) That book focuses heavily on secular humanism. The other was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. (affiliate link)
Now, both of those books are written by atheists, but they couldn’t be more different. Reading them back-to-back made it clear how different atheism can look depending on the person. And that’s when I thought—there has to be a breakdown of the different types of atheism.
So I did some searching and came across Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray. (affiliate link) No keep in mind that most of the literature I’ve read over the years has been either science fiction or Mormon-related. I never really read philosophy, and I certainly never read atheist authors. So this was my first impression of John Gray.
As I read the summaries and reviews, I felt like the book connected with where I was in life. Especially because the first two types of atheism Gray describes matched the exact two books I had just read: new atheism (The God Delusion) and secular humanism (Good Without God). That immediately pulled me in.
mM inner Mormon, said to me, “Hey, you feel like you should read this, so go read it.”
And honestly, I was hooked. Gray doesn’t just explain the seven different types of atheism, he also gives absolutely fantastic historical examples that bring those ideas to life.
Below you will find summarized explanations for each of the seven types.
Type 1: New Athesim
The first type Gray describes is the one most people think of when they hear the word “atheist.” This is new atheism. It’s the kind of atheism you see in Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and in a lot of online spaces.
New atheism is combative. It’s very opposed to religion as a whole. You’ll find it most clearly in places like Reddit forums, especially the atheism subreddit, where the conversation often turns into mocking religious belief. Even the title of Dawkins’ book—The God Delusion—captures that attitude.
To new atheists, religion is like a cancer on society. They believe it has nothing of value to offer. It’s setting humanity back. The world would be better off if we could just get rid of religion and move forward with science and reason.
It doesn’t stop at seeing religion as harmful—they also build their whole interaction with religious people around tearing religion down. These are the people who say things like, “I stopped believing in God the minute I stopped believing in Santa Claus.” They’ll joke about “praying to your sky daddy.” They’ll argue that religious people must have lower intelligence, asking how any adult could possibly fall for belief in God.
For new atheists, the driving belief is that science equals truth. And if we could teach everyone to accept science and reason, the world would finally progress. In their eyes, the story of humanity is a march toward eventually being free of religion and superstition, and arriving at an intellectual society grounded in scientific progress.
Gray is critical of this mindset. He points out that this idea—that truth will eventually prevail and create a better society—is itself a religiously grounded belief. Christianity has its own version of this narrative: send out missionaries, convert the world, and eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. The belief that everyone will one day accept science and reason as the foundation for society isn’t all that different. It’s just framed in secular terms.
So new atheism, for all its efforts to be opposed to religion, ends up mirroring religious ideas. It has its own version of progress, its own idea of salvation, and its own kind of mission work. It’s aggressive, combative, and focused mainly on tearing religion down.
Type 2: Secular Humanism
The second type of atheism Gray talks about is secular humanism. This one stood out to me because it’s the focus of Greg Epstein’s Good Without God, which I had just finished reading.
Secular humanism takes a very different approach from new atheism. Instead of tearing religion down, Secular Humanism focuses on building something positive in its place. The central drive of this type of atheism is that people can live meaningful, moral, and compassionate lives without relying on the existence of God.
The emphasis is on human value. Every person has dignity, worth, and the right to fairness and respect simply because they are human. That belief becomes the foundation for morality, for compassion, and for creating a good society.
This is the kind of atheism you’ll often see tied to charitable organizations that use the phrase good without God. The idea is not to mock religion, but to show that kindness, compassion, and moral behavior aren’t exclusive to people of faith. They’re human traits, and we can rely on them without needing divine authority.
Overall, secular humanism has an optimistic view of human nature. It assumes we are capable of reason, compassion, and creating meaning in our own lives. It’s less concerned with fighting against religion and more concerned with encouraging a positive, ethical worldview grounded in humanity itself.
But Gray pushes back on this too. His main criticism is that secular humanists claim their morals come from reason and science, but in reality, many of their ideas still recycle religious themes. The belief that human dignity and compassion are universal truths, for example, comes from a long history of religious thought. Even when stripped of God, those ideas don’t appear out of nowhere—they’re inherited.
That theme—atheist worldviews borrowing from religion—runs throughout the book. And it comes up even more clearly in the next type Gray describes.
Type 3: A Strange Faith in Science
The third type Gray presents is what he calls atheism with a strange faith in science. This one really grabbed my attention, because it highlights how even when people step away from religion, they often still look for the same answers in different places.
In this type of atheism, science begins to take the role that religion once filled. Instead of looking to God for answers about life, death, and meaning, people look to science and technology.
One of the clearest examples Gray gives is the belief that science will eventually conquer death. Some see this happening through medicine, others through more radical ideas like uploading human consciousness into machines. The goal is to escape the limits of the body and keep living indefinitely.
But Gray criticizes this idea. He points out that moving your consciousness into a machine doesn’t actually free you from death—it just transfers you from one physical form to another. The same problem remains: eventually, that machine will fail, and you’ll still face mortality.
This type of atheism also shows up in the hope that science can eventually answer every question religion once tried to answer: where we came from, what we should be doing, and where we’re going. Some even believe technology could create a kind of godlike intelligence—an artificial superintelligence—capable of guiding humanity better than we can guide ourselves.
Gray argues that this isn’t all that different from religious faith. It still holds onto the idea that one day, answers will come. That we’ll achieve a kind of salvation, not through God, but through science. At its core, it mirrors the same human desire for certainty, meaning, and transcendence that religion has always offered.
So again, the main point is that breaking from religion doesn’t erase those old patterns. We just end up redirecting them.
Type 4: Political Religion
The fourth type of atheism Gray talks about is political religion. This one doesn’t just mean people care a lot about politics. It means politics themselves take the place of God.
In political religion, the state or the political party becomes sacred. Leaders are treated like prophets. Their words and commands are seen as unquestionable truths. Party documents and manifestos function almost like scripture. And the rituals of politics—parades, chants, pledges, oaths of loyalty—become the ceremonies of this new kind of religion.
Gray points to examples like Nazism and Stalinism. Those systems weren’t just political—they demanded the same kind of total devotion that traditional religion demands. The party promised salvation, not in the next life, but in this one. The promise was of a perfect society, a utopia on earth, if only you followed with complete loyalty.
When I think about this, North Korea comes to mind as another example. The state becomes everything. The leader is elevated to almost divine status. People aren’t just obeying laws—they’re worshipping authority.
The danger here, as Gray explains, is that unlike in traditional religions, where ultimate authority is supposed to rest in God, political religions give that power entirely to human leaders or institutions. And when humans hold that kind of unchecked power, they demand absolute loyalty—sometimes going beyond even what religions would have dared to require.
This type of atheism shows that rejecting God doesn’t erase the religious impulse. It just redirects it. People still crave belonging. We still want ultimate truth. We still want something bigger than ourselves. And in political religion, all that devotion shifts from God to the state.
Type 5: The God-Haters
The fifth type of atheism Gray describes is what he calls the god-haters. This one feels closely related to new atheism, but it’s more personal and more emotional.
These are the people who aren’t just against religion—they’re focused on open defiance toward God himself. Their arguments usually center on the problem of suffering. If God is all-powerful and good, then how can he allow children to suffer? How can famine, war, and disaster devastate the world if a loving God is in charge?
On the surface, that can sound a lot like the critiques made by new atheists. But the difference Gray points out is that god-haters don’t just reject belief in God—they fixate on him. Their atheism is defined by anger and resentment toward the very idea of God.
That’s what makes it so closely tied to religion. Even though they claim not to believe, God still sits at the center of their worldview. They can’t stop talking about him. Everything is about how much they hate this figure they don’t believe exists.
It’s not just a rejection of God—it’s defiance. It’s pointing at God, shaking a fist, and shouting that he’s cruel, unjust, or evil. And Gray’s criticism is that this still keeps God alive in their framework. He may be denied as real, but he’s still given power and influence because he’s the one their whole energy revolves around.
In some ways, this type of atheism is the opposite of what a lot of atheists actually want. The goal for many is to move on, to stop revolving life around God altogether. But god-haters keep God at the center, even if it’s through hatred instead of worship.
Type 6: Atheism Without Progress
The sixth type Gray lays out is what he calls atheism without progress. This one stands apart from the others because it doesn’t replace God with anything at all—not science, not politics, not even hope in human goodness.
This is the bleak, nihilistic kind of atheism. It sees life as fragile, uncertain, and often cruel. The universe doesn’t care about us. Nature isn’t on our side. Nothing owes us anything. Humanity isn’t marching toward a brighter future—we stumble, we improve for a while, but in the end our progress always collapses back into failure.
It’s not a story of moving forward. It’s a cycle of mistakes and decline. And in this worldview, life has no ultimate purpose. There’s no salvation, no utopia, no higher plan.
It can feel incredibly heavy. And honestly, it’s the version of atheism that a lot of people fear when they think about leaving religion. I’ve heard people say, “I’m afraid if I stop believing in God, I’ll just end up a nihilist.” That’s the worry—that without God, life will feel empty and meaningless.
But Gray takes a different stance. He respects this form of atheism because it’s honest. It doesn’t borrow old religious ideas. It doesn’t sneak in promises of progress or redemption. It doesn’t pretend science, politics, or human nature will save us. It strips away the illusions and faces reality exactly as it is.
The strength of this kind of atheism is that it refuses to lie. The weakness is that it can feel unbearably bleak. There’s no comfort in it—just a raw acceptance of life’s uncertainty and pain.
Type 7: The Atheism of Silence
The seventh and final type Gray talks about is what he calls the atheism of silence. Out of all the types, this one feels the most modest and the most peaceful.
Atheism of Silence doesn’t try to conquer anything. It doesn’t try to replace God with science, politics, or some grand idea of progress. It doesn’t try to save anybody. It doesn’t even pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it accepts the mysteries of existence and finds meaning in humility.
Gray describes it as being okay with simply living in the moment—looking at the stars, grounding yourself in meditation, finding calm in the everyday. It doesn’t invent new dogmas or creeds. It doesn’t build systems of belief to take the place of religion. It just acknowledges the limits of human understanding and makes peace with that.
There’s something simple and honest in it. No promise of salvation, no mission to convert, no battle to fight—just an acceptance of life as it is, with all its mystery and fragility.
Conclusion
Now, as John Gray describes these seven different types of atheism, it almost comes across as if each of the seven types are a distinct practice of belief that has a hard line between them. But I think it’s probably more of a spectrum. I know I’ve met strong examples of each—people who are angry god-haters, people who are nihilists, people who are secular humanists. And I know I’ve seen myself in more than one of these categories at different times.
I’ve found a lot of myself in some of these descriptions, and I’d encourage anyone reading this to think about where you’d fall in them too.
Going forward, I’d love to keep receiving book recommendations. I want to read more, think more, and really sit with how these ideas apply to me. Most of what I’ve read has been tied to Mormonism, but I don’t want to stay in that box forever. I want to branch out. I want to challenge myself.
I have a long list of books people have recommended, along with others I’ve found, and I’m looking forward to diving into them, so please, keep the recommendations coming.
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