The death of atheism

According to local mythology,* the atheist movement of ~2007-2015 was torn apart by the feminist wars. Back in the day, everyone was standing shoulder to shoulder, promoting the secular agenda.  Then we took a bite of the elevator, and our eyes were opened.  Some of these people we were standing next to were terrible actually.  Why were we on the same side?  Were we ever on the same side?

*This mythology may or may not be accurate, but for this post I’m rolling with it.

In the atheist feminist wars, there is one moment that sticks with me more than anything else.  It’s in 2012, when DJ Grothe complained that there weren’t enough women at TAM (a conference run by Grothe’s organization), because women were warning each other about harassment.

Last year we had 40% women attendees, something I’m really happy about. But this year only about 18% of TAM registrants so far are women, a significant and alarming decrease, and judging from dozens of emails we have received from women on our lists, this may be due to the messaging that some women receive from various quarters that going to TAM or other similar conferences means they will be accosted or harassed.

Grothe was blaming women for warning each other about going to TAM.  But if women are being harassed, that seems like pretty good justification for the warnings!  And if the organizers believe no harassment is occurring, that’s the very opposite of reassuring.

What this moment now symbolizes for me, is that the death of the atheism movement was deserved.  We could blame the death of atheism on the feminist wars, but that’s like blaming low female participation on the warnings of harassment, while ignoring the harassment itself.  The warnings had a good reason to exist.  Likewise, the feminist wars had a good reason to exist.  The atheist movement may have been destroyed, but its destruction was justified.  You could even say it was a long-time coming, or overdue.

And yet, its death may be bittersweet.  I still believe the atheist movement was substantially correct on many things.  If you are of a younger generation, then you too may believe it, without even knowing it.  Because the atheist movement won.  It made being an atheist socially acceptable, even passé.  It outright deleted the societal consensus that religiosity is a happy object.  Although atheists did not defeat American religious conservatism, I still believe that fight is important and worth fighting (though I may not personally invest the time).

The life and death of the atheist movement was a formative experience for me.  Is this what the lifecycle of every social movement looks like?  Through that lens, I’d like to ask: what the hell happened in the subsequent decade?

The death of social justice

Did social justice die?  Is the 3rd wave of feminism over?  I genuinely don’t know, but we could describe a narrative where it died.  You might observe that in 2017, we protested Trump as part of the “Women’s March”, but in 2025 we protested under the less feminist-coded “No Kings”.  You could point to the shuttering of well-known feminist websites like Jezebel, Feministing, Bitch media, and the decline of other publications like Everyday Feminism (or FreethoughtBlogs for that matter).

Also, it’s the vibes.  Surely it’s not just me, you feel the vibes too?

Like with the atheist movement, I emphasize the distinction between the death of the movement, and one’s personal stance.  You may continue to believe that feminism and social justice are substantially correct, and I do too.  Nonetheless, it feels like social justice has diminished in its role as an organizing principle for the cultural wars.

I’d like to continue this analogy between the lifecycles of atheism and social justice, but it strikes me that they’re actually quite different.

I can’t think of a single inciting incident that started social justice on the road to decline.  It feels like it declined for no particular reason.  I can’t think of what new organizing principle replaced social justice.  There was no moment where I looked at social justice allies and thought, “maybe we’re not allies after all, because we’re on opposite sides of issue X”.

Maybe the inciting incident happened without me recognizing it.  Perhaps the inciting incident was the pandemic, or one of the Trump terms.  Maybe the new organizing principle is a form of leftism that places more emphasis on economic oppression.  This didn’t necessarily draw new battle lines, but subtly shifted them, changing what the battle is about.

And on further reflection I can recall tensions within online social justice.  I was in the ace tumblsphere from 2012 to 2020. I’ve seen quite a number of people who were basically up their own asses about it.  They believed that what social justice theory truly demanded of them, was to bully aces or trans people, or just bully people in general.  Tumblr had a lot of young folks on it, so it’s easy to see how a lot of Tumblrites might have grown up and decided that maybe internet social justice had some problems.

Or maybe I’m just pattern seeking.  Mythologizing.  While history may repeat itself, it need not repeat itself quite so identically every time.

These days, I sense a change in the wind.  New battle lines being drawn around AI.  There’s something of substance there, but my heart’s not in it.  I don’t want to erase old battle lines for this one.