Rattibha

1. The future will belong to religious zealots of one form or another. Why? Because every society at its heart is driven by a core religious impulse.
Part of the problem that New Atheism faces is that Old Atheism (public neutrality) is an exhausted cultural/religious force.

2. This idea that we would set aside religious belief in the public sphere, run things based on a utilitarian ideal of doing “what works” is not really working anymore. These public agnostics were fine with people keeping their religion in the closet as a private satisfaction.

3. They spent a lot of time and energy trumpeting the marvels and wonders of science and technology and the power of reason and abilities of experts to run things. They mocked the religious, especially Christians.

4. But in so doing, they more or less turned the state apparatus into something divine. We worshiped the system of neutrality. We worshipped the efficacy of administrative systems to grow businesses, improve efficiency and generate consistent outcomes and solve problems.

5. That began to be shattered with the falling of the twin towers, the morass that was the GWOT, the 2008 financial crisis, the bank bailouts and then the response to SARS-CoV-2 shook people’s confidence in the power of agnostic efficiency.

6. The left was the first to respond, as they didn’t really believe in the system anyways. Having absorbed revolutionary utopian Marxism into the bourgeois power structure in the form of managerial progressivism, this religious impulse began to reawaken. Hello “wokeness.”

7. It has taken the right a little longer to wake up, as they actually believed in the power of the system to safeguard their private religious faith. But as that faith fades, many are waking up to the reality that the system will not protect them. They must engage directly.

8. This is not to say that there is not a lot of power, money and influence in the old center, the old public space that aspired towards a-religious neutrality. There is. And it is a respectable space to occupy. But it is an intellectually and spiritually deaf place to be.

9. The formalism of maintaining the agnostic centre, the new atheism, which is really the same as the old atheism, is a spent force. Believing in the power of “the system” to solve our problems went away once and for all with the GWOT, 2008 and Covid.

10. People are looking for a new religious impulse. On the one side there is the religious left and its belief in Progress and on the other side there is the emerging Christian right. Since there can be only one religious impulse at the centre of society, these two must battle.

11. There can be only one. Either one eliminates the other or the makes the other side surrender. But there is no going back to the old centre, the old public space of “doing what works.” That is a spent force.

12. To put it crudely, we are looking at two options: either some version of the Maoist Cultural Revolution in its full totalitarian glory; or some form of Franco’s Spain, an authoritarian religious state, but Protestant. This is it. This is the future ahead of us.