New Atheism disappeared, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex recently wrote in a typically provocative and long blog post, because New Atheists became progressives.
Religion had initially served as an answer for why half of America insisted on voting Republican, but as the liberal coalition began to contain “too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans,” faith became an unattractive explanation and was replaced by “sexism and racism.” Suddenly, the defining feature of GOP voters wasn’t a faith-based approach to politics, according to this analysis, but holding to views on gender and race that progressives found deplorable.
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