On Atheistic Hinges

Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, philosophers have been drawing on ideas from Wittgenstein’s late work On Certainty in developing an approach to epistemology known as “hinge epistemology.” Hinge epistemology has been of particular interest to philosophers of religion because it considers the role that deep commitments to particular propositions may have within epistemic life, arguably mirroring what is seen in some religious traditions. The issue that motivates the present article is whether or to what extent it is helpful to think of forms of atheism as being grounded in hinge commitments. After considering various forms of atheism, this article advances the view that there are some forms of atheism that do exhibit core grounding commitments that may be helpfully interpreted as hinges. In developing this argument, the article considers two case studies of apparent atheistic hinges: the “secular faith” of Martin Hägglund and expressions of atheism one may find in contemporary Chinese society. While many atheistic beliefs are contingent upon still more fundamental epistemic commitments, some forms of atheism may be held strongly or with such a sense of import that interpretation by means of the notion of hinge commitment will be illuminating.

1. Introduction

Recently, philosophers have been turning to Wittgenstein to understand radical pluralisms about religions and deep epistemic differences (Phillips 2007; Andrejč 2016; Axtell 2019; Venturinha 2019; Burley 2020; Vinten 2025). Also recently, and sometimes in connection with consideration of significant distances between religious ways of life or epistemic stances, Wittgenstein scholars have been turning to the notion of “hinges” from Wittgenstein’s late work, On Certainty, as a way to better understanding the background that implicitly frames inquiry (Moyal-Sharrock 2004; Coliva 2015; Coliva and Moyal-Sharrock 2017). A “hinge commitment” is a grounding feature of a person’s epistemic life. One example Wittgenstein mentions is “I know that this mountain has existed long before my birth.” (Wittgenstein 1969, §85, p. 13) The key idea is that hinges are fundamental commitments that frame our epistemic lives; “hinges” themselves are on the whole, but not always, held beyond the scope of evidence and argument. Numerous philosophers have been also applying this approach to the epistemology of religious belief (Pritchard 2000, 2011; Bennett-Hunter 2019; Gómez-Alonso 2021). The question motivating this article is whether the idea of Wittgensteinian hinge commitments might be useful for interpreting deep differences having to do with atheism. In this paper, I argue that the hinge interpretation of some forms of atheism will be helpful for understanding the role that atheist claims may have within a person’s worldview or way of life. Thus, better than asking if atheism is a hinge commitment, we might instead ask the following: which forms of atheism may be helpfully understood according to this framework, and which forms are likely to be distorted by it?

In line with Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy and its bearing on approaching and addressing philosophical problems, when looking to the question of whether there are atheist hinges, one must take a close look at contexts in which we find expressions of atheism. In this article, I examine various forms and expressions of atheism and then look at them alongside the Wittgensteinian notion of hinges to identify some instances of atheistic hinge commitments and some ways to distinguish them from forms of atheism that are not closely connected to the grounding of a worldview. In this way, a further outcome of the article is a contribution to work on classifications of atheism and nonreligion, as well as consideration of the conditions of communication across deep differences. In Section 2, I give a brief overview of the notion of hinges in Wittgenstein’s late work, On Certainty. After that, in Section 3, I consider some of the classifications of atheism that have appeared in philosophy of religion. Last, in Section 4, I examine two potential cases of atheistic hinge commitments: Martin Hägglund’s defense of “secular faith” and contemporary atheism in China.

2. Wittgenstein on Hinges

Before proceeding, it would be helpful to have a working understanding of “hinges” and how this notion is sometimes used in epistemology and the epistemology of religion. The idea is explored extensively in secondary literature among Wittgenstein scholars and contemporary epistemologists (Coliva 2015, 2016; Moyal-Sharrock 2004; Pritchard 2021). Hinges are fundamental features of our epistemic lives, meaning that they are commitments people hold that frame how they may think about knowledge, about themselves, and about how the world works.

The metaphor itself is taken from Wittgenstein’s late book, On Certainty, a work consisting of four notebooks Wittgenstein worked on over the last two years of his life. His literary executors decided to publish them together in 1969. Over the last couple of decades, the book has gotten more and more scholarly attention, especially in relation to epistemology and the notion of hinges. As with many works of Wittgenstein’s, the ideas expressed in On Certainty consist of Wittgenstein’s responses to something he has found philosophically peculiar; in this case, that peculiarity has to do with the way G. E. Moore in his essays “Proof of an External World and “A Defense of Common Sense” writes of “knowing” something that is fundamental, such as that he has a hand (Moore 1959). Wittgenstein finds expressions such as this to be odd and proceeds to uncover the issue through contrasting cases of knowing something with cases of doubting or being certain. After considering various kinds of things of which we are certain, Wittgenstein writes, “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (§341). Wittgenstein’s objective in the text is to grasp the nature of fundamental certainties and how they relate to knowledge and inquiry. Hinge epistemology seeks to develop this notion of hinges, to see how it might illuminate philosophical problems in epistemology today, including the differences between religious beliefs and ordinary perceptual beliefs and the differences between significantly distant cultural or religious beliefs.

Within contemporary epistemology and Wittgenstein scholarship, the best way to interpret “hinges” is a matter of dispute. Do they have propositional content, or do they only superficially appear to have such content? To what extent are they firmly in place, and to what extent are they changeable? Does the possibility of alternate hinges lead to problems of incommensurability of worldviews and relativism about truth? While I will not engage the arguments over these issues directly, I will refer to hinge commitments rather than propositions (Pritchard 2021), and I do not think that hinge pluralism necessarily leads to relativism.1 Hinge commitments may be expressed in language in a way that makes them virtually indistinguishable from belief reports; yet, unlike ordinary belief claims, hinge commitments have the role of ordering a whole way of thinking and tend to be themselves resistant (if not always impervious) to rational engagement. Examples that Wittgenstein gives include: “My name is L.W.,” “The world has existed long before my birth,” etc. Unlike beliefs about the explanation of a sound or the location of a class meeting, hinge commitments are not typically the sorts of things that one is open to being wrong about. If one is wrong in remembering, say, one’s classroom, it is potentially easy to explain—similar room names or the habit of teaching in an old classroom—but if one is wrong about one’s name, then something very basic has gone wrong.

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s consideration of certainties in On Certainty registers the diversity of forms of certainty as well as the occasional overcoming of at least some kinds of certainty (Moyal-Sharrock 2004). While some hinges may be part of our human nature, or form of life, others will be acquired through having trusting relationships, such as with one’s family or community, and thus will be intersubjectively acquired. The epistemic lives of people rest upon an array of taken-for-true certainties, some of which may be part of human cognition while others will be rooted in experience or culture. Moyal-Sharrock identifies four different types of hinges in On Certainty and argues that it is important to carefully distinguish among these different forms of certainty since they have different properties. Moyal-Sharrock writes, “while all hinges are foundational—that is, our certainty regarding them is not empirically or epistemically justified—some are, as we shall see, universally foundational, others only locally and others still only personally foundational. And while some of our hinges are disposable or giveupable, others are ungiveupable.” (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, pp. 100–101) Linguistic hinges ground our use of language; personal hinges concern certainties of a particular person’s life, local hinges ground the “underlying framework of knowledge of all or only some human beings at a given time” (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, p. 102), and lastly, universal hinges have to do with the “universal bounds of sense for…human beings.” In what follows, both religious and atheistic commitments (when atheism constitutes a fundamental commitment) will be interpreted as “local hinges” to use Moyal-Sharrock’s terminology. Importantly, both religious belief and atheistic commitment are “giveupable”.

Religious hinge epistemology considers the extent to which it makes sense to interpret religious beliefs as being, or being like, hinge commitments. To take Pritchard’s example, “God exists” can arguably be interpreted as the expression of a hinge commitment—like a framework for a whole way of living—rather than a statement that its utterer would be open to reconsidering in light of new information, as with the case of the true classroom location. While there is good reason to be skeptical of broad characterizations of all religious beliefs being interpretable by means of the notion of a hinge commitment (Carroll 2025, p. 105), some are, and it may be useful at times to compare how religious hinges relate to other sorts of hinges.

With that in mind, consideration of whether an instance of atheism may be helpfully understood through the lens of a hinge commitment depends, naturally enough, on the context of its expression. Some expressions of atheism may be downstream of other fundamental epistemic commitments (e.g., to epistemic and metaphysical naturalism), while others may be markers of identity and therefore be more likely candidates for hinge status. In this way, it is prudent to follow Wittgenstein’s advice in Philosophical Investigations to “look and see” when investigating for possible similarities or resemblances when it comes to some phenomenon (Wittgenstein 2009, §66, p. 36), proceeding in piecemeal fashion to see to what extent the notion of hinges may be helpfully used to interpret religious or atheistic ways of life (Carroll 2025, p. 107).

3. Classifications of Atheism

Various conceptual distinctions with respect to atheism have been proposed in recent years. Some distinctions are descriptive of the propositional content believed, while others concern social attitudes of acceptance or nonacceptance of epistemological differences. It is helpful to get an overview of some varieties of atheism so as not to mischaracterize the phenomenon by presuming more uniformity than there is. This also sets the stage for a Wittgensteinian analysis of atheism in terms of hinge commitments. In short, while some forms of atheism fit the notion of hinge certainty, not all do.

William Rowe (1979) distinguishes between three different kinds of atheism in terms of the attitude the atheist ought to take about rationality and theistic belief (Rowe 1979, p. 335). “Unfriendly atheism” is the view that people believing that the theistic God exists are not rationally justified, while “friendly atheism” holds instead that a given theist may be justified in believing in the existence of a theistic God; the “indifferent” atheist then has no belief about the justifiability of theistic belief (Rowe 1979, p. 340). Antony Flew, in reconsidering the burden of proof in encounters between theists and atheists, distinguished between negative and positive forms of atheism. Positive atheism would claim that “there is no such being as God,” while negative atheism would be the view of “someone who is simply not a theist” (Flew 1976, p. 14). In covering a similar distinction, Paul Draper distinguishes between psychological states of atheism, which do not have propositional content about gods, and philosophical views, which do have such propositional attitudes, namely the rejection of the existence of God or gods (Draper 2022). Recently, Harriet A. Harris offered a variety of forms of atheism based upon both academic and practical experience via interfaith chaplaincy; her focus is on the social background of forms of atheism. She distinguishes between, first, “state-encultured atheists,” who may know very little about religions due to strict constraints on public practice, second, “post-Christian atheists,” who are focused on rejecting belief in the existence of God and the miracles mentioned in Biblical texts, and, third, what one might call “contemplative” atheists, who Harris describes as “respectful of religious belief and practice, and looking for the kinds of spiritual awakenings and transformations that prayer, ritual, and connection to transcendence help to effect” (Harris 2023, pp. 1–2). Many more variations on these distinctions, as well as different naming schemes, appear across the literature, but even these three sets of distinctions give a picture of atheism as poised in response to religion (especially Christianity) or independent from religions, atheism for and against pluralism when it comes to the justifiability of foundational claims relating to worldviews, and atheism that seeks to build for itself an approach to meaningful living that remains independent of religions.

In the introduction to The Varieties of Atheism (Newheiser 2022), David Newheiser juxtaposes several different contexts where atheism is ascribed to various figures throughout the history of European and Mediterranean philosophical, religious, and political discourses. Beginning with an account of the views of the so-called “New Atheists” of the early twenty-first century, Newheiser considers the view common among new atheist philosophers and public intellectuals that both atheism and theism may be readily understood as putative empirical hypotheses. A presupposition of this view is that belief is central to both religion and atheism. Newheiser observes that this presupposition came together in much Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and religious thought. Newheiser also observes how Christian analytic philosophy of the middle to late twentieth century also tended to embrace the propositional belief framing of theism and atheism (c.f., Swinburne 1977; Plantinga 2000). Indeed, one can see this even among analytic philosophers seeking to offer a more broad-based view of religious life, such as William Alston, belief figured prominently in his analysis of Christian belief-forming practices (Alston 1993).

So far, there is little reason to think that these forms of atheism might be helpfully thought of as hinge commitments. Ideally, as philosophical positions, these forms of atheism should be as subject to inquiry and the assembling of evidential arguments as any other philosophical viewpoint. For many philosophical atheists, their atheism will be closely linked to their commitments to forms of epistemological and metaphysical naturalism. If there were a hinge to consider here, it might well be to that naturalist outlook. Yet, there may be times, as we will come to see, where fundamental commitments to atheism do rise to the level of hinge commitments.

One popular refrain made by critics of atheism is that atheism is a belief system based on a “leap of faith” similar to what one finds with religions, with atheism’s central claims extending beyond what reason and the available evidence support. Examples of this view are common in popular discourse, but versions of the view also appear occasionally in philosophical contexts. William James’s response in “The Will to Believe” to W. K. Clifford’s strict evidentialism is perhaps one of the more influential critiques of evidentialist skepticism, taking an approach like this (James 1912; Clifford 1999). The core idea in James’s argument is that commitment to evidentialism is itself not without epistemic trade-offs. Clifford’s evidentialist stance can prevent an epistemic agent from engaging with possible candidates for truth. One can also find a variation on this view in popular writing by scholars of religions: “Many atheists are quite religious, holding their views about God with the conviction of zealots and evangelizing with verve.” (Prothero 2010). Naturally, some atheists vigorously reject the characterization of atheism as a form of faith, holding that it presents a biased grasp of atheism (Draper 2022). What this suggests is that broad claims that atheism is a form of faith are likely to lead to a sense of being misinterpreted, and indeed, it is all too easy to let one’s categories overgeneralize across a field of thought, neglecting fine-grained differences. That being said, in some specific cases, comparison with local hinge commitments may be illuminating, so long as one does not presume that what applies for a case here or there applies to all instances of atheism.

In Breaking the Spell (Dennett 2007), Daniel Dennett likewise appears to be skeptical of atheism as a faith or grounding commitment rather than as one philosophical view among others, such as metaphysical naturalism or dualism. His preferred label “bright,” which did not quite catch on in philosophical or polemical discourse, conveys Dennett’s determination that the core commitments he envisions in relation to religions are to inquiry and curiosity rather than to a particular proposition such as that gods do not exist. Indeed, at one point he lampoons the Western Communists and their “red diaper babies” (Dennett 2007, p. 337) who he depicts as espousing commitments to unverifiable claims and certainties that put them on the same footing as religious believers in Western societies. If some forms of atheism were to operate at the level of certainties, like hinge commitments, then for Dennett, it would seem to be so much the worse for those forms of atheism. He instead advocates for empirically grounded and rigorous free thinking that would just so happen to undermine the certainties he takes to be intrinsic to “religion.” Since Dennett also takes belief in supernatural agents to be an essential feature of religion, his approach overlooks other aspects of religions, such as practices, as well as religions that do not focus on supernatural agents (Carroll 2023, p. 117).

When attending to paradigmatic atheists of the nineteenth century, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, one finds not so much rejection of metaphysical theistic belief and its propositional content on the basis of logical or evidential argument, but instead a political, ethical, or aesthetic critique of theism. For example, in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx writes:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

(Marx 2002, p. 171)

We see here the valorizing of revolutionary action to relieve socioeconomic oppression and alienation, and the identifying of religion as the “illusory happiness” that enables people to subsist amidst an oppressive and alienating world. While Marx would likely agree with a rejection of the cognitive claims of a theistic religion like Christianity—he labels it as “illusory” after all—his focus is on how religion obstructs revolutionary action that would directly address this-worldly suffering.

An intriguing feature of Marx’s critique of capitalism and call for changing the socioeconomic conditions of human life is how central “religion,” and especially, the “critique of ‘religion’,” is to his project. After all, Marx’s description of religion as the “opiate” of the people is part of his account of the ideology that sustains and supports capitalism and its tendencies towards alienation of workers. For Marx, religion helps human beings cope with heartless, inhumane conditions, yet it also functions to sustain those very conditions. (Marx 2002, p. 171) Struggling against religion is, for Marx, essentially struggling against capitalism, just on the level of ideology. For this reason, Marxist philosophy is arguably an ambiguous case when it comes to interpreting atheism as a hinge commitment. While commitments to revolutionary action do appear to be fundamental—more so than a commitment to atheism—critique of religion occupies a very important place in Marxist thought. For this reason, it would be prudent to proceed on a case-by-case basis when it comes to Marxist thinkers or movements and interpreting espousals of atheism.

What this conceptual and historical overview suggests is that there are a wide variety of ways in which atheism has been conceived, rather than a single historical thread. There are connections across the history of philosophy when it comes to forms of atheism, but it is crucially important to look carefully and contextually at instances of what is being claimed and why. It is for making sense of this philosophical diversity when it comes to the different forms of atheism that Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge certainties is particularly helpful. The notion captures the ways in which a commitment may organize and motivate a set of practices, a way of life, or a social identity. Some instances of atheism may be hinge commitments that ground and direct a way of being in the world, while other instances of atheism may be sensitive to disputation. For instance, many forms of atheism will not be expressions of hinge certainties because they are philosophical positions resting on other fundamental commitments (e.g., to naturalism). Marx’s view in the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” comes down, arguably, to revolutionary action; that is the reason for his atheism. In principle—even if it were more or less unthinkable to Marx—a revolutionary religion might survive the Marxist critique. Admittedly, determining hinge from that which is dependent on a hinge is a matter of interpretation; it will not always be obvious which is which. There may be cases where it is very difficult. Yet, I argue that in at least two cases—and I am confident there will be significantly more cases—it is helpful to approach them as instances of atheistic hinges.

4. Atheistic Grounding Commitments: Two Cases

4.1. Martin Hägglund’s Secular Faith

The first case of a putative atheistic hinge commitment that I would like to explore comes from Martin Hägglund’s recently published book, This Life. In this book, Hägglund develops the idea of secular faith in a comprehensive way. The expression “secular faith,” however, appears considerably earlier in an essay of that name by Annette Baier (Baier 1980). In the 1980 essay, Baier recognizes the importance of developing a coherent way of life to ground nonreligious, naturalistic thinking. What justifies moral behavior when many others do not live morally? Baier argues that a form of secular faith is needed for this: “the secular equivalent of faith in God, which we need in morality as well as in science and knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and its evolving procedures—in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes.” (Baier 1980, p. 133) Importantly, Baier does not represent this faith as a certainty, quite the opposite. It is a striving for what one—or one’s community—does not see. Does this mean it would be wrong-headed to see her secular faith as a hinge commitment? I do not think so. Only a narrow conception of hinges—as fundamental certainties—would lead to that view, but if one is open to the changeability of one’s fundamental commitments, then I think Baier’s secular faith would be a candidate for an atheistic hinge commitment, in this way similar to Hägglund’s view.

While Baier is concerned with ethics and epistemology and their grounding in something that is not God, in appealing to the notion of secular faith, Hägglund is focused on ethics and existential meaning; his account and defense of secular faith is much more rooted in reflection on politics and meaning in life than is Baier’s. While Hägglund does not engage with Baier’s views, both are concerned with the importance of a sort of secular answer to what they argue is the function that faith may have within religious contexts. A robust atheistic philosophy is one that emphatically owns its own commitments.

Hägglund’s book, This Life, offers a portrait of “secular faith” as he understands it, as fundamental to caring for contingent human lives and for our fragile planet. In so doing, he provides an account of what one might call secular naturalism as a way of life, and more than that, as a basis for facing the unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. His philosophy encompasses a secular perspective that is influenced by Marx and Nietzsche, but Hägglund develops his secular philosophy for our era of international economic integration, religious diversity, and global environmental crises. Indeed, Marx is a recurring conversation partner for Hägglund, as Hägglund develops a political and economic vision for what would allow for the fullest expression of human freedom in protecting what he understands to be our intrinsically valuable world.

A core part of his argument for secular faith is his critique of religion’s inherent preoccupation with “another world” or form of being, whether it be eternal life in heaven, rebirth into a pure land, encountering enlightenment, or being reborn into a next life. Hägglund writes:

Hence, our ecological crisis can be taken seriously only from the standpoint of secular faith. Only a secular faith can be committed to the flourishing of finite life—sustainable forms of life on Earth—as an end in itself. If the Earth itself is an object of care in our time of ecological crisis, it is because we have come to believe that it is a resource that can be exhausted, an ecosystem that can be damaged and destroyed. Whether we care about the Earth for its own sake or for the sake of species that depend on it, the awareness of its precarious existence is an intrinsic part of why we care about it.

(Hägglund 2019, p. 9)

In Hägglund’s estimation, even if religious actors support, for example, a project to address greenhouse gas emissions, they will do so for religious reasons, such as concern over karma or sin and its relation to ultimate spiritual goals like enlightenment or eternal salvation, rather than out of any intrinsic valuing of the world or instrumental valuing of it as an enduring resource for loved ones and descendants.

Moreover, we see that Hägglund advocates for secular faith because it is rooted in the actual lives of people, with their relationships and forms of heritage, especially when they reflect on their homes and histories. Human life is contingent not just on our families and natural dwellings, but also on the shifting landscapes of human histories. What we may try to preserve in secular faith is not an original commitment to the land and people but a thoroughly contingent and precarious form of life that has gradually, or sometimes rapidly, changed due to other contingent events. Against this backdrop, secular faith is belief in the possibility that human beings can take care of their loved ones, their communities, and their natural environments. Hägglund writes:

Secular faith is committed to persons and projects that may be lost: to make them live on for the future. Far from being resigned to death, a secular faith seeks to postpone death and improve the conditions of life. As we will see, living on should not be conflated with eternity. The commitment to living on does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of a form of life.

(Hägglund 2019, p. 6)

Secular faith, for Hägglund, appears to function like a local hinge or grounding commitment insofar as it guides moral action to care for human beings and the natural world as well as the rational inquiry that might assist in effectively putting that care into practice. The key reason Hägglund thinks an atheistic point of view needs to be a form of faith is to crystalize the way of life and its care for the contingencies of the world we live in. Secular faith enables those committed to it to see value in the contingent sources of meaning and being over against supposed “eternal” sources. Hägglund holds this is a needed commitment.

In contrast with a “religious” view with its focus on moral or environmental action for the sake of values relating to “eternity” (e.g., salvation in Christianity or nirvana in Buddhism), secular faith invests itself in the fragility and contingency of human life in this world, whether considered on the human or the geological scale of time. To demonstrate this, Hägglund locates himself within a family stretching back hundreds of years and looking ahead into his children’s lives. He then situates that family lineage within the geographical space of Sweden, depending upon the affordances of the natural landscape. His life is contingent upon these lives and this place. Care for these people and this landscape reflects a commitment to secular faith. Hägglund’s faith is, arguably, a ventured hinge commitment. He is trying to explicitly articulate a way of life so as to make it more achievable for others and so as to convince others who agree with his commitments to take action within their own lives.

4.2. Atheism in China

Philosophical contemplation of atheism in China has been a focus of European philosophy and religious thought since at least the seventeenth century. From the Jesuits to Leibniz, philosophers and theologians in Europe have been intrigued, puzzled, or frightened by the possibility of atheism in China and the, at the time, counterintuitive combination (to Europeans) of atheism with an ordered and moral society. (Clayton 2006, p. 213) Perhaps this was because China provided a counterexample to the common early modern European association of atheism with immoral behavior (Clayton 2006, p. 185).

Because Communist forms of government are very closely linked to atheism, looking to these contexts may provide valuable insights, broadly speaking, into the viability of the idea of atheism as a grounding commitment (Pospielovsky 1987). From the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe to China, ruling Communist parties have identified with atheism, and when they permit the legal existence of religions, they closely circumscribe their practice and manifestations. While there are important differences among these societies and their religious policies, each looks to a Marxist analysis of religion as being of fundamental importance. This link between Communist parties and governments is no surprise, as Marx identified religion as the opiate of the people. As previously observed, Marx’s critiques of “religion”—which tend to focus especially on European Christianity—are more political and ethical than logical or epistemic. He does not criticize religious ideas for their logical incoherence or conflict with relevant evidence; rather, it is the hypocrisy of Christianity when it comes to ethics and the tendency of Christian institutions to sustain unjust socio-economic systems and resist efforts at action to improve circumstances that are notable reasons for Marx’s opposition. Marx sees the struggle against “religion” as the beginning of the struggle against the alienating world (i.e., capitalism) and its legitimating ideology. The fundamental grounding commitment of Marx’s philosophy would seem to be to the dialectic of historical materialism; religion as he understands it is incompatible with this commitment, but that does not necessarily make atheism a fundamental commitment for Marxists, even as it is closely linked with a revolutionary commitment. That being said, I argue that some atheists in China indeed do view their atheism as a fundamental commitment, in a way that may be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of Wittgensteinian hinges.

The Chinese Communist Party is famously atheistic, prohibiting members from identifying with religions (Yang 2012). The forms of atheism within the party vary—adding to the list of variants explored in Section 3: from militant “antireligious” atheism (committed to the elimination of religion) to “Enlightenment” atheism (focused on limited tolerance of religions within society so long as they do not cause social harm) (Yang 2012, p. 45). The Enlightenment view has been, for the most part, the official policy of the government since 1982 and the publication of the relevant Document 19 (see MacInnis 1989). Among other things, the document spells out a Chinese Marxist understanding of religion and the need for a social policy of regulating religions during the period of religion’s slow, inevitable decline. If religion is an epiphenomenon of material history, having an impact on five aspects of human social life: “Religion is (1) complex, (2) mass-based, (3) long-lasting, and has implications for relations with both (4) ethnic minorities and (5) the nations of the world.” (MacInnis 1989, p. 2) In this context, religion is typically conceived as being antithetical to Chinese Marxist understandings of society—especially through either its “feudal” origins or connections to foreign empires—while also being at the same time potentially supportive of social and moral development within society while under the guidance of the government.

Marx’s examples of religion come almost exclusively from Christianity. When he wrote about religion in 1844, he likely had in mind the religions of central and western Europe: Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity as well as Judaism. His concept of religion would have likely derived from these particular movements and their histories rather than the somewhat later notion of a “world religion,” a term with its own complicated and often overlooked history (Masuzawa 2005). Marx’s concept of religion is thus roughly in line with that of other European philosophers and scholars of his time. Indeed, among European and North American philosophers, a diversified conception of religion has been a rather late addition, and default Christian theist conceptions of religion continue to predominate in much of the field of philosophy.

The question then arises whether Marx is the opponent of religions that many take him to be. Does his critique of “religion” also apply to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions that go unmentioned? A straightforward answer can be found in Document 19. In that publication, which makes reference to a Marxist theory of the origin and nature of religion, the religions of China are listed as Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. (MacInnis 1989, p. 11) A shift has taken place here, from a European Christian-theistic conception of religion to the “global” conception of religion that is then given the local focus of China.

Against this context, Chinese students today are educated in a way that privileges atheism over all forms of religiosity. Expressions of Chinese identity sometimes invoke atheism as in the statement, “We Chinese are atheists.” The scope of the statement can be doubted, not least because of the millions of Christians and Muslims living in China and the millions more who practice forms of devotion that are identifiably Buddhist or perform temple rituals linked with gods of Chinese popular religion (Yang 2012; Chau 2019); yet, it conveys a statement of identity that applies at least to some Chinese people. Identity statements like this initially signal a contrast with others, within a larger world of difference, especially given the associations between religion and national and ethnic identity. The effect appears to be one of demarcating differences: other people may be religious, but not Chinese people. In the context of twentieth and twenty-first century life, it also conveys the overarching power of the Chinese Communist Party and its commitment to state atheism. It is like an existential landscape feature—a “form of life” if you will—in the Chinese context (Wittgenstein 2009, §19, p. 11; Carroll 2025, p. 124). Atheism is presented as normative; religiosity deviates from that norm.

In this way, we might call it a sort of commonsense atheism that pervades Chinese society, notably among young Chinese students. Though not for all, for a good many students, the expression of Chinese atheism may also point to a commitment to (Marxist) “materialism” over against “idealism” (which is understood to capture the illusory character of religion but also much of philosophy). Expressions of atheism may be a way of expressing that materialist philosophical commitment. As might be anticipated, this commonsense atheism is taught in public schools, with a clear emphasis on the relatively distant history of religions and their foreign or feudal origins rather than their contemporary urban footprints in China (Nanbu 2008; Yang 2012; Zhao 2020).

What I would like to argue is that expressions of Chinese atheism like “we Chinese are atheists” may be interpreted at times as amounting to a local hinge commitment (Moyal-Sharrock 2004). Expressions of atheism can draw together the strands of a whole way of life and the process of education and enculturation. Moreover, they guide thinking and the formation of new beliefs. In that way, they represent the roles that local hinges play in committing to a way of life. While the hinge is not inherently and immovably locked into place, it remains quite stable for many people.

5. Conclusions

The key objective of this article has been to advance the piecemeal hermeneutical use of Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge commitment for understanding salient features of some forms of atheism, which are held at a higher level of commitment than ordinary beliefs. While many forms of atheism are downstream from still other, more fundamental commitments, in other cases, when atheism is very closely connected with group identity or existential questions, then those forms of atheism may be helpfully understood as hinge commitments. Because the term “atheist” has at times been used as a pejorative, it makes sense to be very careful with using atheism to label a person or movement when the category is not self-applied. Similar care should be shown with ascriptions of hinges to philosophical viewpoints. This is not to argue that these hinge forms of atheism are irrational; far from it, in Wittgenstein’s view, hinges are part of our epistemic architecture. Some beliefs are held above doubt in order to get by in the world.

I argue that the atheistic hinges we see in Martin Hägglund’s secular faith and in some areas of contemporary Chinese thought are local hinges, meaning that they are socially acquired in a particular place and time. Hägglund’s embrace of atheism evinces an attempt to live out atheism in all its entailments as a “form of life,” especially when it comes to putting into practice care for the finite lives of human beings and the fragility of the natural world on which we all depend. For some Chinese people, atheistic belief goes well beyond mere assenting to a theory such as dialectical materialism and instead becomes the root to a way of life, framed by Chinese history and politics, influenced by Chinese Marxism in contemporary education.

When it comes to understanding expressions of atheism and whether they function as hinges, rejections of hinges, or as contestable statements, following Wittgenstein, we should adopt a policy of looking carefully at individual cases. There will not be one comprehensive answer to the question whether atheism is a hinge commitment because across the broad history of philosophy and religious thought, a considerable variety of beliefs, behaviors, and identities have been labeled as atheistic. Identifying contextual features of the forms of atheism one encounters will be invaluable for avoiding hermeneutical missteps, but also for better appreciating the diverse social contexts in which we live and thus the possibilities for conversations across boundaries of difference.2