Prompted, at least in part, by 9/11, New Atheism rumbled through the ‘noughties’. It was noisiest towards the end of that decade, thanks the self-described ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion,  Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, God is not Great by Hitchens and Breaking the Spell by Dennett were all published in a cluster around 2007.

In 2009, British citizens were treated to the spectacle of the ‘Atheist Bus’ — a double decker advert declaring ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’ — created by the comedian Ariane Sherine with the support of, again, Dawkins.

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The themes of the Four Horsemen’s treatises are now widely known: religion is dangerous and deeply irrational; only science, and the light of reason, can save humanity from the plague of superstition and violence it whips up.

Most religious responses took the bait. Some were shrill and ill-informed. The best, like The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath, did a good job of exploding the facile underpinnings of most of the arguments, but didn’t succeed in changing the terms of the debate. Unapologetic did. The first chapter was serialised run in full by the Guardian, for one thing.

For another, Spufford is a real writer, a writer’s writer. Picked as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997, he is unusual in publishing both critically acclaimed, commercially successful novels and books of non-fiction, as well as collections of essays. He is also a professor, teaching creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College. The book directly prior to Unapologetic was Red Plenty, about life in the USSR. This segue into religion came as a bit of a surprise, not least, apparently, to his agent.

So Spufford’s prose is hilarious and precise (but excruciating) as he acknowledges the worst caricatures of Christian belief: “Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak”. It helps that he has spent some time as an atheist. Spufford knows all the flaws and failings of religion. Yet he still wants to offer, not “a defence of Christian ideas [but] a defence of Christian emotions — of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity”.

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He moves the debate out of the zero-sum dingdong about the Big Bang and biblical archaeology and philosophical proofs — and into the realm of feelings. And not because feelings are just easier (the clue is in “intelligibility and grown-up dignity”) but because for almost all of us, that’s what drives not just our metaphysics, but most of our deepest decisions.

Spufford was not alone in pushing in this direction. Although he had been writing about it in academic circles since the late nineties, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also broke into the mainstream in 2012 with The Righteous Mind. Building on his earlier work “The emotional dog and its rational tail”, he updated the metaphor as an elephant and rider. Our emotional, intuitive judgements are the elephant, actually in charge, and our reasoning minds construct post-hoc rationalisations for why we wanted to go that way in the first place. Daniel Kahneman — a Nobel laureate psychologist and economist had made similar arguments in Thinking, Fast and Slow the previous year — and the work of Ian McGilchrist, among many others over the decade, all contributed to this growing sense that we are not as rational as we thought.

In seeking to shift the debate about religion into the realm of emotions, then, Spufford was not dodging the “real question”:

“If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether this crap I talk is true”.

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For the record, he does care, describing himself as a fairly orthodox believer who can recite the creeds. It’s not that he doesn’t think truth is important, but that arguments about whether God exists are self-defeating: “No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know if there’s a God (and neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins…it isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item).”

Instead of getting stuck there, he agrees with the major move in social psychology and neuroscience this decade: “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I assent to the ideas”.

Crucially, he argues that this is true of everyone. It’s not only that religious people have faith because of their feelings — the opposite can be true:

“There are arguments to be made [against the existence of God]…but for a lot of people they function as a rationalisation after the event for a deep and emotional conviction that the universe is just not the kind of place in which such things can happen.”

The move is a good and persuasive one, but it’s the manner in which he writes about emotions that make the book so successful. There is no schmaltz; no earnest, dusty, churchy tone. Atheist philosopher John Gray called it, “a rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through”.

Whether describing sin — the crack in everything — as HPtFtU (the Human Propensity to Fuck things Up) or exploring the sense of divine mercy in Mozart’s Clarinet concerto, Spufford writes about the lived experience of faith more accurately and beautifully than anyone except Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene and Dostoevsky (significantly all novelists).

People will still be reading this book once the new atheist polemics (and their religious responses) have been consigned to the recycling bin of history, because it is more powerful, more human, than any of them.

The only problem with this, as Alec Ryrie astutely observes in a new book on the rise of atheism, is that “death-by-philosophy … is a poor fit with the actual chronology of western secularisation”.

Atheism, he asserts, was alive and well before the Enlightenment. And considerable religious revivals — Methodism, Hasidism, the Russian Orthodox church — occurred after it, even as a reaction to it. In many ways, Unbelievers: An emotional history of doubt is a reflection on the cultural significance of experts, a challenge to those who, as historian Dominic Erdozain put it, “privilege the clean logic of ideas above the raw fuel of human experience among the forces of historical change”.

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What Ryrie’s account achieves is an explanation as to why atheism often remains so angry. That it is angry seems undeniable — from the vituperative nature of exchanges on social media, to the hardly concealed fury of its leading lights, Dawkins, Hitchens etc, there can be little doubt it is driven as much by passion and righteous indignation as by following the consequences of cold clear dispassionate rationality. “Reason is a slave to the passions” as David Hume rightly noted.

For Ryrie, a scholar of the Protestant Reformation, the passion in question has its roots in the protest against the abuses of the church of Rome, of well-padded priests feathering their own nests, of the bullying authority of the Papacy. For in seeking to establish an alternative source of religious authority, Protestants loaded a great deal more significance on the notion of faith, and its near cousin intellectual assent. It was under this category that the reformers would mock the Roman church and its practises as “superstitious” – making fun of Roman practises as mumbo-jumbo, transubstantiation, the veneration of bones and so forth.

According to Ryrie, reason became “a battering ram against the Papacy”. Doubt was mobilised by the Reformation as a means of dislodging Roman authority and of returning the believer to a more serious wrestling with the scriptures and their own personal convictions. In his way, doubt became a mechanism for the intensification of piety. “The aim was not to turn believers into unbelievers. It was to turn naive believers into sophisticated, self-aware believers”; that is, to shift the centre of religious authority from the church to the self. Scepticism began life not as a dispassionate estimation of the soundness of the arguments for the existence of God, it was the weaponisation of reason in the assault against over-weaning Roman power.

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Scepticism has grown intellectually respectable since its sectarian origins. But Ryrie’s contention that its power and effectiveness derive as much from its emotional impact as its rational argumentation makes considerable sense to me, not least because “one cannot be reasoned out of something one was never reasoned into”. None of which is to discount or discredit the rational case against God. But disproofs of God’s existence are about as effective in creating atheists as proofs are in creating believers. Such arguments are shadow boxing. The real battle is always emotional.

Which is why, for Christians, the book to read alongside that of Ryrie’s Unbelievers is that of Francis Spufford, published back in 2012. In many ways, Ryrie’s account of the origins of unbelief feels a lot like an academic prequel to Spufford’s much celebrated Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.  It helps that Spufford is a brilliant writer. But what makes Unapologeticwork so well is that it seeks to make sense of faith in its own terms, rightly refusing the unbeliever vs believer boo-hurrah that has sucked so much contemporary debate about religion into its boringly constricted channels.

Spufford explains Christianity by reminding us of the sort of work it is intended to do. The proper starting point is not the question of God’s existence, but what he calls “the HPtFtu” – or, “the human propensity to fuck things up”. The propensity extends to our relationships, our attempts to be good, even to our rationality. Emotionally, Christianity begins within the unfixable realities of human life, its tragedies and absurdities. Even its blood-soaked history, including that of the Reformation, is just yet another example of the HPtFtu.

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Christianity grows out of the broken and unfixable. Its USP is to be found within and alongside the stuff that doesn’t work – indeed, that’s why someone so naturally sympathetic to Christianity as Dostoyevsky gives all the best arguments in The Brothers Karamazov to those most hostile to it. But this isn’t its failing as much as its point.

As Spufford claims: “Virtuous and idealistic atheists are at work all over the place, but it is observable that a surprisingly large number of believers are at work with the dying, the demented, the addicted, the institutionalised and the very impaired and afflicted, where the best that can be done is to love for the sake of it” and to “keep sorrow company”.

Christianity is a prolonged meditation on all the stuff in our lives that doesn’t work. It gains its emotional power by its connection with failure – moral, emotional, intellectual. I suppose that is why I read the New Atheist critique of Christianity as often obviously correct, and yet strangely irrelevant. What they take to be a kind of philosophical or quasi-scientific explanation of things is often much more like a cry for help. And to accuse a cry for help as being intellectually confused is a peculiar kind of response.

Yes, Christianity does have substantial things to say about human pain. But 99% of the work that it requires of us is to recognise our inability to fix ourselves, our incapacity. That’s what monks were doing in the desert. They were not punishing themselves for being sinful, or anything like that. They were living up close and personal to their own fragility, their own pain and failure. If you want to attack Christianity on its own terms, attack it here (as someone like Nietzsche does, for instance).

Now, of course, you may completely disagree with my characterisation of Christianity. Many will. But what Ryrie’s engaging book suggests is that the battle over God is really a battle about a certain sort of emotional literacy. For the Christian life is as much dependent on arguments about God’s existence as birds are dependent upon ornithology.