In 2005 I was invited to contribute to a volume celebrating the life and work of Richard Dawkins, which was published in 2006 under the title Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. My essay title plays on Richard’s 2003 anthology A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. After decades of illuminating the minds of millions of people through his popular science writing, Richard Dawkins turned his keen mind to religion, and the result was the birth of the New Atheist movement, which began shortly after this tribute volume was published.

I took the opportunity to come at the problem from a different angle from that of the New Atheists’ anti-theism strategy of attacking religion directly, and argue instead for raising consciousness for religious skepticism through political freedom, namely protecting the rights of believers so that the rights of nonbelievers are equally protected.

A shorter version of this essay was originally published in the Los Angeles Times opinion editorial pages on July 22, 2008, as “Toward a Type 1 Civilization: Along with energy policy, political and economic systems must also evolve.” This essay is about how we can transition from a zero-sum tribal world to a nonzero global world.

The place of religious broadcasting at the BBC was transformed by the rise in the sixties of television comedy marked by a strong mockery of the churches and, as this chapter shows, in the seventies by direct attacks on the churches and the advent of science-based atheist narratives of astronomy, human evolution and cultural development. What unfolds here is a story of direct challenge to the churches, including on the so-called God slot of television programmes reserved for religious outputs. For the first time in the early 1970s, churchmen were exposed to direct challenge, notably Cardinal John Heenan, from Humanists and atheists. Following this, sophisticated documentary series developed on scientific knowledge and human cultural evolution, founded firmly on evolution theory and marked by historical exploration of church attempts to suppress scientific knowledge. In the train of this came a proliferation of science-based broadcasting which accepted the atheist view of the human place in the universe as revealed especially in astronomy, transforming the narratives told by the nation to itself on television.