Most movement atheists weren\u2019t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.<\/p>\n
Eventually, things came full circle. I started this essay with a memory of noticing that my favorite early-2000s-era website had two off-topic forums: one for religion vs. atheism, and one for everything else. Earlier this year, SSC\u2019s subreddit split in two<\/a>: one for \u201cculture war\u201d discussions mostly about race and gender, the other for everything else.<\/p>\n Where do we go from here? I\u2019m not sure. The socialist wing of the Democratic Party seems to be working off a model kind of like this, but hoping to change the hamartiology from race\/gender to class. Maybe they\u2019ll succeed, and one day talking too much about racism will seem as out-of-touch as talking too much about atheism does now; maybe the rise of terms like \u201cwoke capitalism\u201d is already part of this process.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve lost the exact quote, but a famous historian once said that we learn history to keep us from taking the present too seriously. This isn\u2019t to say the problems of the present aren\u2019t serious. Just that history helps us avoid getting too dazzled by current trends, or too swept away by any particular narrative.<\/p>\n If this is true, we might do well to study the history of New Atheism a little more seriously.<\/p>\n