Hedges sees this as the reappearance of a kind of utopianism that the Western world has already experienced, most recently in the 1960s. But it is the very certainty of the New Atheists that alarms Hedges. “The nonbeliever will talk of religion as a blind man talks of color,” he retorts. Fanatics hate complexity. In essence, says Hedges, the New Atheists have succumbed to a form of fundamentalism perhaps more dangerous than the more well-known religious variety. Hedges sees both the religious and atheist fundamentalists —whether “blustering televangelists” or their cultural opposites—as pushers of “illusion and false hope.” These antagonists “each claim to have discovered the absolute truth…. They trade absurdity for absurdity…. They banter back and forth in predictable sound bites. They promise simple and seductive dreams.”

While Dawkins and Company hijack the concept of human evolution to elevate their brand of atheism to the level of true “progress,” Christian absolutists cling to their clichés of a kingdom to descend from heaven dealing death and terror to all but them. He explains: “Evil for the Christian fundamentalist and the atheists is not something within them but an external force to be vanquished.”

Hedges is not an evangelical Christian. He is more an old-style liberal humanist in the tradition of Erasmus or Albert Schweitzer. Some of his ideas are more than a little left of center. But he is on to something. As an experienced war correspondent who has confessed his own addiction to the “rush and excitement of battle,” he has something important to say about extremism, no matter from which direction it is coming.

Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008), 224 pages. $25.