On Monday, this article in the Guardian, “Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America’s unbelievers,” about what is best described as an evangelical crusade by the celebrated Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, caught my eye.

I confess to being a bit puzzled by the current wave of attacks on religion. I am both a Ph.D. (with lots of science) and a regular church-goer, long under the impression that the alleged incompatibility of the two was a 19th century notion, associated with such organizations as The National Secular Society in England (to which Annie Besant devoted her estimable talents during the years before she helped found Theosophy), and perhaps best exemplified by vigorous period pieces, such as Andrew Dickson White’s massive two volumes, published in 1898, on The Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom. Over the last year or so, however, a powerful new wave of distinctly old-fashioned anti-religious campaigning has begun, with people like Christopher Hitchens and Professor Dawkins in the lead. I find myself asking why.

Many factors can be adduced: merits in the atheist argument; a desire to forestall criticism that secular and scientific politics as practiced in the last century proved disastrous; resentment of the way some politicians constantly invoke God. But maybe more sinister forces are at work.

Consider this statement by Professor Dawkins in an interview with the Guardian:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though in fact they are less numerous, I am told—religious Jews anyway—than atheists and (yet they) more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence the world would be a better place.

What do we make of a professor of science who claims to be so rational as to have no tolerance for The God Delusion—the title of his latest book—but who nevertheless accepts uncritically that Jews “more or less monopolize American foreign policy”? Dawkins does not say “influence” or even “disproportionately influence,” both of which would be debatable but empirically defensible. He says “monopolize,” which is simply untrue.

This quotation suggests that, if not actually hostile to Jews, Dawkins focuses on them and their alleged monopoly of influence in a way that bodes nothing welcome. Will the new, passionate non-believers Dawkins seeks to awaken now join the long procession of mobs, demagogues, religious zealots, and conspiracy theorists who have likewise focused irrationally on Jews? I sense worrying disorder in the mind of this self-proclaimed rationalist.