this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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I still really don’t understand how this happened. I was a part of the “New Athiest” community (until this, basically), but the reason it appealed to me was seemingly the opposite of 90% of that group.
I was a young teenager that grew up in a conservative small town full of evangelical southern baptists, so I had no understanding of class analysis, but could see that the white evangelicals were loudly in favor of making everything worse. When your main enemy is evangelical Christianity, the obvious conclusion is that the things they hate are good: LGBTQ rights, feminism, racial equality, and international solidarity.
How the fuck do you have “evangelical Christians are bad” as your only political belief and end up agreeing with every single thing they believe?
A lot of those atheists became STEM majors and went to work in the defense industry.
Skill issue, I became a STEM major too and I just look at fluorescent microscope images of mouse brains all day, didn’t make me a fascist
IMHO there were two key factors: one, the broadening of new atheism to critiquing religions other than evangelical Christianity, Islam in particular. That gave cover for Western chauvinism, imperialism, and “cultural Christianity” as fighting Islamic repression.
Second, for a good chunk of the movement, new atheism didn’t erase anti-feminism, it just gave it a new veneer. They centered it in pseudoscience rather than religious doctrine. What made this tricky and not readily apparent is that, at least initially, most of those misogynistic new atheists played a self-congratulatory “I have rejected religion ergo I’m one of the ‘good guys’” tune.
The first major public drama that exposed this was elevatorgate; there was some secular/atheist conference where a female attendee had an uncomfortable encounter with a male attendee in an elevator. After the conference, she made a blog post about it saying, guys please don’t be creepy. Now while there were plenty of people who agreed with her, there was also a vocal group that attacked her for it (not surprisingly, the latter included Richard Dawkins).
they were only bad because they opposed harry potter, pornography, violent video games and the powerful truth of science. the social consciousness was only as good as it was compatible with that so you'd get the occasional lip service until and unless there was pushback on saying the n-word to their black friend with the power of free speech.