Of course it’s a cult–there’s nothing new about this observation. I said it myself before on this very message board, long ago.
But it’s not anchored necessarily in evangelicals. As Guinastasia says above, it’s a cult of personality, and evangelicals just hop on for the ride. It’s the total lack of any critical thinking ability, festering in the brain like an abscess, brought on by the intellectual malnutrition which develops out of a diet of pure reality TV and other bullshit. Trump knows how to rhetorically cultivate and exploit this mental disability with (really quite ordinary) flimflam–just as any other cult leader does. Fundamentally it’s not anything new, but rather just the first time someone managed to use it to become president.
This mental feebleness spans across many varied demographics, which is why everyone always has a hard time trying to sum up the die-hard, unwavering Trump supporters in a nice, simple demographic description. But just look at Scientologists: they come from all kinds of backgrounds and social classes–educated or not, rich or not. Really, the only single thing they all have in common–along with Trump’s core–is feeble-mindedness, and in particular, no critical thinking capacity at all.
Not to my knowledge, although I wouldn’t be shocked if Sam Harris says something like that in another decade or so. I may paint with too broad a brush, but I see a continuity from new atheist movement from the middle 2000s to the alt-right. On sites like Reddit, 4chan, and especially Youtube the new atheist community spent most of their time criticizing creationists, but then a large part of them switched targets to feminists, SJWs, and college liberals, especially after Elevatorgate. They eventually got swept up in the reactionary movement we’ve seen in the last several years, especially during Gamergate and the MENA refugee crisis.
Here’s some examples of reactionary atheists defending Christianity. I’m sure there are better examples, but I don’t feel like crawling around the muck of the Youtube alt-right community.
Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist atheist, on Religion and the Alt-Right
RockingMrE, an ancap atheist, explains how Christianity enhances Western culture
An Atheist’s Defence of Christianity
One of the more mainstream figures for this undercurrent is Jordan Peterson. He’s cagey about his own beliefs, but it’s doubtful he’s a literal believer in Christian dogma. He emphasizes that Christian stories are important because of the truths they point to, not whether they literally happened or not.
The TL;DR version of their arguments is that Christian values are a bulwark against Islam, cultural Marxism, post-modernism, political correctness, feminism, and other menaces from the left. Additionally, they say Christianity possesses certain characteristics that contributed to the rise and dominance of the West, and that such values hold a people together with a common cause. It’s the standard reactionary line, except from people who don’t actually believe in God.
I haven’t followed the new atheist movement exactly, and the only one of those guys I’ve actually read anything from directly is Dawkins.
That said, I just can’t see the train of logic you’re pointing to here. Dawkins certainly argued vehemently against Islam, but his contrasting pole was always atheism and rationalism. I’ve never seen him say anything good about Christianity. If anything, it seems like he thinks of Christianity largely as how I imagine Der Trihs does: a pretty dangerous ideology, but most Christians are living in modern, largely secular societies, so their damage is limited. IE, Christianity is no better than Islam, just more constrained currently. Feel free to let me know if I’m misreading him, or if Harris and others deviate from this thinking.
I’m not going to watch the YouTube videos, but I’ll take a look at the articles. Assuming you’ve represented their views correctly, what does this have to do with the Harris/Dawkins/Hitchens axis of ‘New Atheism’, other than the atheism part?
I have no trouble believing that there are people who both have reactionary views around gender roles and race/Islam, and I have no trouble believing that some of those guys are atheists, and I don’t really have trouble believing that they’d reason that despite that atheism, Christianity provides some value. What I’m not seeing is that these are ‘New Atheists’ in the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens mold who went reactionary.
And don’t forget: THESE are the people that accused Obama voters of being Messiah-seekers.
That might apply to older voters, but a lot of the younger Trump supporters were in college or high school when Obama was president and they weren’t really thinking too hard about him, let alone using terms like “messiah-seekers” to describe his voters. I have observed the “alt-right” since before that term took on the explicitly neo-Nazi connotations it has now, when it broadly referred to what I’d call “irreverent, secular conservatism that used memes and offensive humor as its primary form of communication.”
I think it’s a pretty logical extension of a generation that grew up with South Park, online gaming, and the anonymity [which is gradually diminishing] afforded by the internet. I’ve always thought that a big part of the appeal of the alt-right is simply the breaking of taboos. Young people love to break taboos. I think a lot of it is young people going through a phase. I think in 10 years a hell of a lot of these people are going to have very different ideas. Those of them that aren’t shot to death by the National Guard during the Food Riots of 2023, anyway.
I don’t follow the actual atheist movements. I am fully aware of the online atheist movement, though. And a whole lot of that has definitely taken on the alt-right tone. These tend to be white men who are very anti-feminist and anti-social justice.
The New Atheist movement seems not to be the same thing as this, but more like the second wave to a new third wave atheism that is actually quite bigoted.
You can really see the same people who were into these third-wave atheists on YouTube now going crazy for Trump and supporting the alt-right.
You’re talking about the celebrities, who certainly haven’t helped, but I’m talking about the large online atheist communities that sprung up in their wake.
I heard someone say ‘the people who thought Obama was a Muslim are the same people who think Trump is a Christian’
It does make sense: traditional Christianity (as opposed to, say, ‘prosperity Gospel’) does call on adherents to show compassion toward those who aren’t at the top of the social/economic hierarchy. And libertarians don’t really ‘do’ compassion.
Similarly, traditional Christianity calls for tolerance toward those who fail to be members of one’s own tribe–Christ at the well with the Samaritan woman, etc. Libertarians, again, don’t appear to place much value on tolerance, diversity, equal opportunity, etc.
John 4: 6-9. John 4:1-25 NIV;KJV - Jesus Talks With a Samaritan Woman - Bible Gateway
And they’re right.
Those people they’re talking about may not be right, but they’re definitely certain.