Until a little over a decade ago, you couldn’t go online without being inundated by talking points from the popularly called New Atheists. In contrast to past popularizers of godlessness like Russell, Shaw, or even Sagan, the New Atheists largely dispensed with the genteel intellectual routine and waged constant rhetorical war on the God they insisted didn’t exist. Armed with memes cooked up by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, they took the internet by storm.
What’s odd is that you most likely had to be reminded of those once-celebrated personalities and the pop culture movement they started. It makes sense with Hitchens, since he’s dead. Dawkins’ sporadic clashes with the Death Cult have left him looking rather like an old uncle prone to absent-minded shuffling around town in his bathrobe. Nobody’s heard much from the other two in years.
Likewise, the once-acclaimed Four Horsemen’s imitators and coattail riders have fallen off the radar. Checking in on them reveals that the old class of new atheist YouTubers have either switched topics, moved on to other things, or seen their viewership dwindle to a fraction of its late aughts heights.
The question arises as to what happened. How did a cultural force that seemed poised to sweep the world fade out with a whimper?
One explanation holds that the New Atheism achieved its purpose. If new demographic projections are to be believed, Christians will be a minority in the US by 2070. That drastic decline in a once-Christian nation would seem to indicate that atheism routed the enemy from the field.
That scenario is not, however, what other data show. If atheism had won Americans’ hearts and minds, we’d expect atheists to be popular. Yet polling shows that no one likes them. And according to the same outfit that’s predicting a Christian minority, atheism is losing adherents faster than any major religion.
Even the pollsters admit that what’s happening is young adults are leaving organized religion to join the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones”. That group is not synonymous with atheism, as a large majority of Americans’ continued belief in God attests.
Meanwhile, other studies show that the growth of the nones, which peaked with the Millennials, has been arrested with Generation Z. And the Covid scare rekindled public interest in religion.
The real story buried in the numbers is that mainline and evangelical Protestantism are losing Zoomers to Catholicism.
What really happened to the New Atheists? They didn’t usher in their promised godless utopia, that’s for sure. That Christianity’s decline has led to a societal collapse, which in turn is collapsing atheism, suggests that the latter is a product of a soft, decadent culture that’s giving way to hard times.
It turns out that the New Atheists were useful idiots for the priests of the new religion all along. Of the 30% of Americans who say they practice no faith, a majority adhere to the heretical secular faith that’s become the de facto established church.
To paraphrase a wiser man, take away people’s faith in God and they don’t believe in nothing, they’ll believe anything.
Those new beliefs now include contradictory propositions like “Men in wigs are women” and “Murder is healthcare.”
In fact, every Death Cult dogma makes the most paranoid atheist caricatures of Medieval Christianity look ultra-rational.
Which is by design, since the ruling Cult’s public liturgies are just a series of increasingly bizarre humiliation rituals.
The New Atheists helped lower the public’s guard against the Death Cult. They’ve since outlived their usefulness and have been cast aside. Only an authentic Christian resurgence can break the Death Cult’s grip on Western civilization.
For a rousing discussion of this and many other prominent topics, check out my recent guest appearance on NewPub Talk with author David V. Stewart.
And learn how to break free of the Cult, reclaim your dignity, and have fun while you’re at it.
Wow, yeah, I genuinely needed to be reminded of the New Atheists. I came back to the faith in the very tail of the 2000s/very dawn of the 2010s, so they were still a major force back then. Could hardly even exist on the Christian blogosphere without some “Evil God Argument” or joke about Chariots of Iron or something come up every week or two. Hard to believe that they would fall so hard, isn’t it? It’s also ironic that they were done in by a far more dangerous and irrational religion than the one they spent all their time attacking. One that happily embraces self-contradiction, such as “homosexuality is an inborn and immutable trait, but being male or female is a choice”. Of course, these beliefs cancel each other out (if you can just change sex at will, then being attracted to the same sex is no more tragic or significant than your preferred fashion sense), but they just purge you if you point that out (hence the TERF vs Trans wars raging in their community).
The thing about Death Cult cannon fodder is that they never know they’re cannon fodder. They all think they’re leading the charge and giving the orders when in fact they’re just the next stage of a human wave attack. And, if you try to tell them they’re expendable, they may get angry and accuse you of the very thing you’re trying to point out.
Hah!, I had never thought of that analogy, but the trans vs TERF wars are very much like Russian soldiers finding themselves at the tender mercies of a Soviet blocking brigade in WW2.
Missed much direct contact with the New Atheist wave (the blessings of limited social-media interaction I guess). I only filled in the blanks when I happened on a documentary of Amos Yee, the Singapore kid whom skeptics backed as a free-speech champion even after he declared support for child porn. I wonder if that was a factor in the fall-off.
The belief that markets respond to consumer demand no longer holds, if it ever did. That goes double for the marketplace of ideas. The media’s chief power isn’t giving something bad press, but no press. What happened was the Death Cult saw no further use for the skeptic crowd, so they buried them.
The last I heard of Sam Harris, he was explaining how moral he is for not caring if a politician’s son abused children or dealt in treason because the Greater Good or something. But he’s going to find that objective source of morality any day now, everyone!
Every of those old nu-atheists by now is either a full on breadtube supporting mind-killed zombie, a confused and usually sympathetic “none” more open to discussion, or outright religious. The old group doesn’t exist anymore.
That middle group, though, I think they’ll eventually make the jump with enough prayer and experience. It’s a lot harder to deny the state of the world and the decline when you aren’t just hearing it from some egghead geek fudging statistics to prove that a safe neighborhood = unending Progress towards Utopia. It’s one of the reasons I talked about Wells and his Open Conspiracy in The Last Fanatics. The root of that insanity is being pulled up as we speak, and it is about time.
They’re weaker now, but they aren’t defeated. The death cult is keeping them in reserve for when the Catholics rise up:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/new-style-atheism-can-counter-christian-nationalism-decline-religion-n1297611
The existential dread that Catholic Integralism evokes in the Death Cult puts the lie to “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” fifth columnists.
I think one reason the New Atheists stopped being promoted is because it was realized that they weren’t effective at their job. Their attacks started making people think more about religion. The very fact that the New Atheists were aruging against religious beliefs caused people to consider whether those beliefs are true or not. And some of those people came to the “wrong” conclusion.
But attacking religion indirectly is much more effective. Just sweep it under the rug or talk about racism and then you can avoid making anyone think at all.
For all their manifest stupidity and insanity, the Death Cult’s one masterstroke was using their media control to keep Christianity from affecting the public square instead of trying to stamp it out with force.
In the post-9/11 world, to give them their due, the New Atheists were among the very few with a public platform who were loud and unapologetic in defence of the West. They were unselfconsciously trying to kick away its most important pillar, of course, but it took some moxie to point out the obvious about Islam, to call out and shame its apologists and recognise that we had entered a new phase of a very old war. I think that explains their appeal at that time – people were seriously frightened, felt betrayed, and needed SOMEONE to be on their side.
I can tell you what was appealing to me, for a mercifully short period of time: I was a dumb teenager who was questioning religion, and the new atheists were actually asking questions people in Church would have been confused to even think about. So they didn’t have answers.
Thank God I had a brilliant theology teacher who DID have answers and I wasn’t content with simply assuming those answers didn’t exist, but the appeal is obvious. You get to be smarter then all your dumb religious friends.