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.
