you claim that I've advanced no propositional content here - which is demonstrably false - but then, you've advanced none of your own, which in my experience is a tactic of those who do not feel authentic religious feelings but are uncomfortable with a lack thereof
by the way the notion that Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism are entirely or generally non-theistic religions is entirely incorrect and a classic example of projecting Western liberal values onto Eastern peoples; for example, the vast majority of the world's Buddhists believe in a theistic and supernatural Buddhism in which the Buddha is indeed a type of divinity, as are the Bodhisattvas etc
Not in any way a violation of the spirit of the Buddha and not in any sense less legitimate than anyone else's conception of the Buddha - but a vision of Buddhism that is necessarily overrepresented in the Western conception of the religion precisely because it is more conducive to Western attitudes. My point is just that there are untold millions of Buddhists who practice a theistic Buddhism with concepts similar to conventional notions of God, heaven, and similar, but many people will confidently tell you that this is not what Buddhism is; the issue is that the latter will always have greater visibility than the former. It's ancient and broad and multivariate and we should take great care in ever saying that it's any one thing.
See I dig all of that, that's interesting to me. Look, at some point I have to write something about Marxism and its actual essence, which is not egalitarianism but a fairly rigid school of scientific rationalism. I don't think there's much out there besides elementary particles and the void. But you should think what you will.
I, for one, would be fascinated to read about how you ground your thinking in the "scientific rationalist" aspects of Marxism. Few self-avowed modern-day Marxists write about historical materialism and dialectics etc—primarily, I think, because they've never actually read Marx and Engels (or Hegel), and perhaps also because it's intellectually indefensible, but it would be interesting to hear your take on it.
For this reason, I regret bringing up my two boys without organized religion. You can find community w/o religion, but it's not easy. But, larger than that, especially my oldest, suffered from a sense of meaningless and nihilism that led to depression. (He's better now, but he went through a very painful time for several years.) For my son, life did become somewhat unbearable as Freddie bleakly describes in his post "You are Exhausted because Life is Pain." Now this could've been just teenage angst that would've occurred anyway, but the true coldness and meaningless of existence is hard on children. Later, when children are older, they can cognitively and emotionally better deal with emptiness and may decide to abandon the comforting certainty that religion teaches. But, honestly, I wish I had given my kids that comfort in childhood.
Religious ethical systems are just as contentious an answer to the "sez who" question as anything else. It's a mistake to think that there was any society at any point in human history where the question of legitimate moral authority had been totally and definitively resolved.
It's interesting to compare your assertion that religion has become unmoored from its underlying beliefs, turning into "religious consumerism," with the "What are you, 12?" article, where you talk about modern "Marxists" being unmoored from Marxist economics. You might be right in both cases, but so far as I can see Marxist economics has no more intrinsic truth than Christian ontology. In both cases, you have to accept the underlying reality claims as axiomatic to get the full benefit of the ethics and thought systems built on them—otherwise, as you say, religious and political ideologies degenerate into clubs like any other.
Good essay. I wonder, has Freddie read any of the contemporary philosophy of religion by believing Christians? It's fashionable to say that all of these philosophers are just rationalizing their childhood upbringing, though you could say the same for most philosophers' defending their beliefs about morality or free will (and some philosophers have!).
I'm a practicing and, as much as I can, believing Catholic myself, so I bring up the contemporary, serious, philosophical Christians, not because I think they're sociologically interesting, but because I think they're substantively interesting. So, I think it would be worth it for DeBoer to read some of them--at least Plantinga, I guess, though his approach isn't my favorite.
Nevertheless, one thing that may be happening with Christianity and other religions is that for them to work, you need to be in a community of serious believers. This is the point that virtue ethicists sometimes make: virtues have ecological niches, and to the extent those ecologies evolve into something else, the virtues not only lose their point but become, if not impossible, then at least very difficult, to practice. If that's right, then we may lose the old religions but get some new kinds of religions (e.g., contemporary anti-racism, if John McWhorter is to be believed).
I don't know of many smart and interesting people who talk about God in terms of existence. They instead talk about about meaning, purpose, values, phenomenological experience, narrative structure, etc. Despite not being religious, I think this was why I never related to the celebrity Atheist types. There are levels of sophistication in religious thinking, and they only attack the very base level, defined by a fairly unique American Christian fundamentalist version of belief. Or the Islamic equivalent. Though I am glad this is begin attacked and hopefully removed from politics.
Meanwhile, nothing of interest has been added to the conversation everyone else was having. I think a lot of this stems from different takes on 'Truth'. Your use of truth in this essay, and asserting that literal existence is the highest truth, is an idea that didn't exist until long after most religious traditions had formed. I'm friends with a Rabbi who would never make any scientific truth claims about religion. He understands that he is making a different category of truth claims.
More recently, popular figures like Peterson, Harris, Žižek command quite the following and are moving the conversation in this direction, focusing more on the meta-truths in religion and less on any scientific claims.
if the new atheists won by losing, how come the secularisation trend in america seems to have been going steady since the late 80s? in fact, from what i can tell, the new atheist period doesn't seem to have made a dent in this trend at all. maybe new atheism was just some temporary, ephemeral and ultimately impotent phenomenon caused by deeper structural, material or demographic forces?
(one candidate for a deeper force would be information age technology, which allows believers to find both information that contradicts their points of view and communities outside their faith-based local surroundings. i'm thinking for example of the role that r/exmormon has played and continues to play in helping people find their way out of the lds church.)
I'm mostly convinced that the deeply religious will have the last laugh, just given demographic projections (see Kaufman's "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?") due to hormonal birth control and abortion-on-demand. We already see this happening in Israel, for example.
As someone who has read far too many European philosophers writing about the death of God (from Hegel, who was the lantern that Nietzsche's madman was holding, to Heidegger and the rest), I have to say that it's incredibly amusing to think that this supposed end of history and endgame of Western thought will just fizzle out in a century or two due to secular Europeans contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. (I mean, I suppose it's also sad at some level, but after all they're choosing to do it ...?)
When you think about all of the autumnal and vaguely melodramatic things written about this topic, from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," to Eliot's line about "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," Heidegger spending a decade desperately trying to find some way to revive European religious life (through his 1930s writings on the "last god" etc.), it turns out that this was just a temporary condition, a case of certain people in certain cities in America and Western Europe turning away from God for a couple centuries, until they simply fade out of existence and humanity returns to its usual religious orientation. And the beauty of it is that even if religious populations slowly 'moderate' or secularize over time -- for example, Europe will almost certainly be majority Muslim by 2080, but let's say that these Muslims slowly secularize -- the cycle will start again; believers will have children, secularists will stop having children, etc.
Popular/nerd culture (and Vox et al.) seem to accept it as a given that the inevitable endgame of history is, like, the Starfleet Federation Council in 2342 A.D., a super-U.N. where culture is irrelevant, no one is religious, everyone is a scientist, etc., but this may not necessarily be the case . . . hormonal birth control is a hell of a drug.
While it's true that the religious have more children on average than the non-religious, I don't think that argument quite holds water. I know many, many, many atheists who were raised to be religious. In fact just about every atheist I know (including me) was raised in a very religious household.
Conversely, when someone is raised in a household where religion is just not discussed, then the children seem more likely to check the boxes for "spiritual" or something of that nature, rather than "atheist" i.e., an atheist in every way except the label.
People often have beliefs different than their parents' beliefs.
Kaufman's book is really interesting and worth checking out, as it works through all of these arguments -- essentially the factor you've mentioned is less relevant because very religious families have MANY more children (and these children, on average, remain very religious). Most atheists were indeed raised religious, but they're usually having 0-1 children. Thus after a few more generations, the math clearly works out in the very religious families' favor.
Again, Israel is already showing this to be the case, their culture has been clearly shifting to religiously conservatism (due to ultra-orthodox birthrates); it's only a matter of time for other cultures, as far as I can tell, though who knows what the exact timeframe will be. And certainly some people will still be non-religious or non-affiliated -- as they are in Israel right now -- but they simply aren't having enough children.
My understanding is that the data from the last ten years have shown that strongly religious groups in the US have had decreasing birthrates, such that many of Kaufmann's points no longer hold up.
From what I could see, it appears that ALL birthrates are declining (among all cohorts) slightly more than Kaufman predicted, so the general argument still applies, but the overall ratio might be different, i.e., it may take slightly longer. In absolute terms, 'very religious' people will (ultimately) have more children than the non-religious or unaffiliated, unless we see a drastic shift in Western culture (certainly possible)
I think it's very Protestant to write as you do here that *belief* in "ancient stories" or "metaphysical claims" are what characterize any religion. I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever. I don't know any Jewish people who try to "convert" others - trying to persuade them to give cognitive and affective assent to a set of statements about the nature of reality - they don't seek converts, actually. I mean, do Catholics actually give a shit about orthodoxy - look at Santa Muerte; did medieval illiterate peasants care about what the Bible "said" or did they care about the Passion plays and the liturgies; do Buddhists necessarily believe in a being who "judges all of us on how devout and moral we are"??
Not so much - because the liturgy is the point, the behavior is the point, the culture is the point, the embodiment is the point, the family is the point, the good smells and dim lights and great music are the point, just as much as you might say "belief" in something or anything is the point. More than anything, what it does for you and to you is the point. If it works, you're going to keep doing it. American religion and religious culture is obviously broken and impoverished, which is why it produces atheists.
I find it odd to jump immediately from the question of belief to the question of proselytism. You can certainly have sincere metaphysical beliefs and, for whatever reason, not be interested in making converts. Or, you can be bent on making converts to a religion that is largely about liturgy/ritual. Not sure the point of bringing these issues together.
That's what Freddie's describing, explicitly. Proselytizing (arguing ad nauseum) for a given set of metaphysical beliefs, or otherwise (for the new atheists, that "metaphysical" is a meaningless descriptor, perhaps).
"I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever"
I'm sorry, but that's because you don't live in Chandigarh. Are you not familiar with Hindutva? There is and has always been an evangelical, even triumphalist, capacity within Hinduism. Not all strains but, well, it's Hinduism. In general, the notion that Eastern religions are somehow more enlightened/more ecumenical is a product of mysterianism and a very filtered version of what these religions are - filtered through Western liberal sensibilities.
Not all strains of Christianity are evangelical either. Some are, more than others. That's the point. Not all strains of Judaism are evangelical- in the sense that they proselytize beliefs, seek converts, or even find the word "belief" intelligible. It would probably be most helpful to proceed from the discipline of anthropology in defining *what religion is* and *what it does.* I'm just pointing out it's immensely more complex than belief, especially belief in a God who judges.
Bostrom said somewhere--maybe in what you linked to--that the Simulation Argument is what convinced some of his atheist friends to believe that we could have an afterlife.
This fits with my basic sense of what is happening in the US. In educated, liberal spaces almost no one is religious. Some people go to church, but they don't take it seriously. For one thing, they don't care that other people aren't religious -- if you really believed the teachings, wouldn't you want to save your friends' souls?
A lot of parents feel strongly about their kids going to church, but it seems to be more about enforcing good behavior and traditional values (marriage, family, community, etc) than being really into Jesus. But that makes it really easy for the kids to discard the whole thing once they go to college. If it's not literally true, why bother?
I'm very curious to see what happens with attendance after the pandemic. I bet a lot of people who weren't strong believers will be reluctant to going again--especially if they belong to boring churches. Catholic mass is so dull and repetitive -- not something they're likely to miss. The churches that have dancing, food, picnics, etc. might do better.
I feel like there's been a fairly recent retcon of the new atheist movement to make it something more important and concrete than it really was. I honestly compartmentalize it in the same zone as furries - a small group of weirdos who maybe had more of a visible presence online in the early 2000s because the internet wasn't 'everyone' yet. I think the retcon allows some interesting arguments to be developed, but it just doesn't reflect the reality of the time - that 'loudly atheistic people' were an extremely marginal group in every sense.
Freddie, do you know about religious market theory? I'm an atheist much like you, but I think RMT is basically correct, and it predicts forthcoming revivals.
When your Substack was introduced I was eager to subscribe but to be honest, your atheism posts were what I was looking forward to the least: everything I had read previously on subject had either been someone lamenting how hard it is living in a predominantly Christian country or some Maher/Dawkins-style smarm. I wasn’t eager for more.
Not that you need my praise, but as a practicing Catholic I found this piece original; it gave me things to think about and was all well-put. Thank you.
you claim that I've advanced no propositional content here - which is demonstrably false - but then, you've advanced none of your own, which in my experience is a tactic of those who do not feel authentic religious feelings but are uncomfortable with a lack thereof
by the way the notion that Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism are entirely or generally non-theistic religions is entirely incorrect and a classic example of projecting Western liberal values onto Eastern peoples; for example, the vast majority of the world's Buddhists believe in a theistic and supernatural Buddhism in which the Buddha is indeed a type of divinity, as are the Bodhisattvas etc
Not in any way a violation of the spirit of the Buddha and not in any sense less legitimate than anyone else's conception of the Buddha - but a vision of Buddhism that is necessarily overrepresented in the Western conception of the religion precisely because it is more conducive to Western attitudes. My point is just that there are untold millions of Buddhists who practice a theistic Buddhism with concepts similar to conventional notions of God, heaven, and similar, but many people will confidently tell you that this is not what Buddhism is; the issue is that the latter will always have greater visibility than the former. It's ancient and broad and multivariate and we should take great care in ever saying that it's any one thing.
See I dig all of that, that's interesting to me. Look, at some point I have to write something about Marxism and its actual essence, which is not egalitarianism but a fairly rigid school of scientific rationalism. I don't think there's much out there besides elementary particles and the void. But you should think what you will.
I, for one, would be fascinated to read about how you ground your thinking in the "scientific rationalist" aspects of Marxism. Few self-avowed modern-day Marxists write about historical materialism and dialectics etc—primarily, I think, because they've never actually read Marx and Engels (or Hegel), and perhaps also because it's intellectually indefensible, but it would be interesting to hear your take on it.
For this reason, I regret bringing up my two boys without organized religion. You can find community w/o religion, but it's not easy. But, larger than that, especially my oldest, suffered from a sense of meaningless and nihilism that led to depression. (He's better now, but he went through a very painful time for several years.) For my son, life did become somewhat unbearable as Freddie bleakly describes in his post "You are Exhausted because Life is Pain." Now this could've been just teenage angst that would've occurred anyway, but the true coldness and meaningless of existence is hard on children. Later, when children are older, they can cognitively and emotionally better deal with emptiness and may decide to abandon the comforting certainty that religion teaches. But, honestly, I wish I had given my kids that comfort in childhood.
This reminds me of one of my favorite essays of all time, Arthur Leff’s Unspeakable Ethics Unnatural Law. Without religion all ethical systems fall to the “Sez who” question. But the essay is enjoyable for his great writing. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://duckduckgo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3810&context=fss_papers
Religious ethical systems are just as contentious an answer to the "sez who" question as anything else. It's a mistake to think that there was any society at any point in human history where the question of legitimate moral authority had been totally and definitively resolved.
It's interesting to compare your assertion that religion has become unmoored from its underlying beliefs, turning into "religious consumerism," with the "What are you, 12?" article, where you talk about modern "Marxists" being unmoored from Marxist economics. You might be right in both cases, but so far as I can see Marxist economics has no more intrinsic truth than Christian ontology. In both cases, you have to accept the underlying reality claims as axiomatic to get the full benefit of the ethics and thought systems built on them—otherwise, as you say, religious and political ideologies degenerate into clubs like any other.
Good essay. I wonder, has Freddie read any of the contemporary philosophy of religion by believing Christians? It's fashionable to say that all of these philosophers are just rationalizing their childhood upbringing, though you could say the same for most philosophers' defending their beliefs about morality or free will (and some philosophers have!).
I'm a practicing and, as much as I can, believing Catholic myself, so I bring up the contemporary, serious, philosophical Christians, not because I think they're sociologically interesting, but because I think they're substantively interesting. So, I think it would be worth it for DeBoer to read some of them--at least Plantinga, I guess, though his approach isn't my favorite.
Nevertheless, one thing that may be happening with Christianity and other religions is that for them to work, you need to be in a community of serious believers. This is the point that virtue ethicists sometimes make: virtues have ecological niches, and to the extent those ecologies evolve into something else, the virtues not only lose their point but become, if not impossible, then at least very difficult, to practice. If that's right, then we may lose the old religions but get some new kinds of religions (e.g., contemporary anti-racism, if John McWhorter is to be believed).
I don't know of many smart and interesting people who talk about God in terms of existence. They instead talk about about meaning, purpose, values, phenomenological experience, narrative structure, etc. Despite not being religious, I think this was why I never related to the celebrity Atheist types. There are levels of sophistication in religious thinking, and they only attack the very base level, defined by a fairly unique American Christian fundamentalist version of belief. Or the Islamic equivalent. Though I am glad this is begin attacked and hopefully removed from politics.
Meanwhile, nothing of interest has been added to the conversation everyone else was having. I think a lot of this stems from different takes on 'Truth'. Your use of truth in this essay, and asserting that literal existence is the highest truth, is an idea that didn't exist until long after most religious traditions had formed. I'm friends with a Rabbi who would never make any scientific truth claims about religion. He understands that he is making a different category of truth claims.
More recently, popular figures like Peterson, Harris, Žižek command quite the following and are moving the conversation in this direction, focusing more on the meta-truths in religion and less on any scientific claims.
good read!
if the new atheists won by losing, how come the secularisation trend in america seems to have been going steady since the late 80s? in fact, from what i can tell, the new atheist period doesn't seem to have made a dent in this trend at all. maybe new atheism was just some temporary, ephemeral and ultimately impotent phenomenon caused by deeper structural, material or demographic forces?
=> https://religionnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/figure3.3-generational-change-religious-disaffiliation.png
(one candidate for a deeper force would be information age technology, which allows believers to find both information that contradicts their points of view and communities outside their faith-based local surroundings. i'm thinking for example of the role that r/exmormon has played and continues to play in helping people find their way out of the lds church.)
I'm mostly convinced that the deeply religious will have the last laugh, just given demographic projections (see Kaufman's "Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?") due to hormonal birth control and abortion-on-demand. We already see this happening in Israel, for example.
As someone who has read far too many European philosophers writing about the death of God (from Hegel, who was the lantern that Nietzsche's madman was holding, to Heidegger and the rest), I have to say that it's incredibly amusing to think that this supposed end of history and endgame of Western thought will just fizzle out in a century or two due to secular Europeans contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence. (I mean, I suppose it's also sad at some level, but after all they're choosing to do it ...?)
When you think about all of the autumnal and vaguely melodramatic things written about this topic, from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," to Eliot's line about "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," Heidegger spending a decade desperately trying to find some way to revive European religious life (through his 1930s writings on the "last god" etc.), it turns out that this was just a temporary condition, a case of certain people in certain cities in America and Western Europe turning away from God for a couple centuries, until they simply fade out of existence and humanity returns to its usual religious orientation. And the beauty of it is that even if religious populations slowly 'moderate' or secularize over time -- for example, Europe will almost certainly be majority Muslim by 2080, but let's say that these Muslims slowly secularize -- the cycle will start again; believers will have children, secularists will stop having children, etc.
Popular/nerd culture (and Vox et al.) seem to accept it as a given that the inevitable endgame of history is, like, the Starfleet Federation Council in 2342 A.D., a super-U.N. where culture is irrelevant, no one is religious, everyone is a scientist, etc., but this may not necessarily be the case . . . hormonal birth control is a hell of a drug.
While it's true that the religious have more children on average than the non-religious, I don't think that argument quite holds water. I know many, many, many atheists who were raised to be religious. In fact just about every atheist I know (including me) was raised in a very religious household.
Conversely, when someone is raised in a household where religion is just not discussed, then the children seem more likely to check the boxes for "spiritual" or something of that nature, rather than "atheist" i.e., an atheist in every way except the label.
People often have beliefs different than their parents' beliefs.
Kaufman's book is really interesting and worth checking out, as it works through all of these arguments -- essentially the factor you've mentioned is less relevant because very religious families have MANY more children (and these children, on average, remain very religious). Most atheists were indeed raised religious, but they're usually having 0-1 children. Thus after a few more generations, the math clearly works out in the very religious families' favor.
Again, Israel is already showing this to be the case, their culture has been clearly shifting to religiously conservatism (due to ultra-orthodox birthrates); it's only a matter of time for other cultures, as far as I can tell, though who knows what the exact timeframe will be. And certainly some people will still be non-religious or non-affiliated -- as they are in Israel right now -- but they simply aren't having enough children.
My understanding is that the data from the last ten years have shown that strongly religious groups in the US have had decreasing birthrates, such that many of Kaufmann's points no longer hold up.
From what I could see, it appears that ALL birthrates are declining (among all cohorts) slightly more than Kaufman predicted, so the general argument still applies, but the overall ratio might be different, i.e., it may take slightly longer. In absolute terms, 'very religious' people will (ultimately) have more children than the non-religious or unaffiliated, unless we see a drastic shift in Western culture (certainly possible)
I think it's very Protestant to write as you do here that *belief* in "ancient stories" or "metaphysical claims" are what characterize any religion. I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever. I don't know any Jewish people who try to "convert" others - trying to persuade them to give cognitive and affective assent to a set of statements about the nature of reality - they don't seek converts, actually. I mean, do Catholics actually give a shit about orthodoxy - look at Santa Muerte; did medieval illiterate peasants care about what the Bible "said" or did they care about the Passion plays and the liturgies; do Buddhists necessarily believe in a being who "judges all of us on how devout and moral we are"??
Not so much - because the liturgy is the point, the behavior is the point, the culture is the point, the embodiment is the point, the family is the point, the good smells and dim lights and great music are the point, just as much as you might say "belief" in something or anything is the point. More than anything, what it does for you and to you is the point. If it works, you're going to keep doing it. American religion and religious culture is obviously broken and impoverished, which is why it produces atheists.
I find it odd to jump immediately from the question of belief to the question of proselytism. You can certainly have sincere metaphysical beliefs and, for whatever reason, not be interested in making converts. Or, you can be bent on making converts to a religion that is largely about liturgy/ritual. Not sure the point of bringing these issues together.
That's what Freddie's describing, explicitly. Proselytizing (arguing ad nauseum) for a given set of metaphysical beliefs, or otherwise (for the new atheists, that "metaphysical" is a meaningless descriptor, perhaps).
"I don't know any Hindus who try to persuade non-Hindu people to assent to set of precepts or visit their temple with them or whatever"
I'm sorry, but that's because you don't live in Chandigarh. Are you not familiar with Hindutva? There is and has always been an evangelical, even triumphalist, capacity within Hinduism. Not all strains but, well, it's Hinduism. In general, the notion that Eastern religions are somehow more enlightened/more ecumenical is a product of mysterianism and a very filtered version of what these religions are - filtered through Western liberal sensibilities.
Not all strains of Christianity are evangelical either. Some are, more than others. That's the point. Not all strains of Judaism are evangelical- in the sense that they proselytize beliefs, seek converts, or even find the word "belief" intelligible. It would probably be most helpful to proceed from the discipline of anthropology in defining *what religion is* and *what it does.* I'm just pointing out it's immensely more complex than belief, especially belief in a God who judges.
Not all atheisms are monolithically focused on "belief" or the lack thereof, either. In a weird way I feel you're being reductive about atheism, too.
typo: PZ Myers, not PZ Meyers.
Apparently you have not yet realized that this is just a computer simulation that we are all living in:
https://www.simulation-argument.com/
Bostrom said somewhere--maybe in what you linked to--that the Simulation Argument is what convinced some of his atheist friends to believe that we could have an afterlife.
This fits with my basic sense of what is happening in the US. In educated, liberal spaces almost no one is religious. Some people go to church, but they don't take it seriously. For one thing, they don't care that other people aren't religious -- if you really believed the teachings, wouldn't you want to save your friends' souls?
A lot of parents feel strongly about their kids going to church, but it seems to be more about enforcing good behavior and traditional values (marriage, family, community, etc) than being really into Jesus. But that makes it really easy for the kids to discard the whole thing once they go to college. If it's not literally true, why bother?
I'm very curious to see what happens with attendance after the pandemic. I bet a lot of people who weren't strong believers will be reluctant to going again--especially if they belong to boring churches. Catholic mass is so dull and repetitive -- not something they're likely to miss. The churches that have dancing, food, picnics, etc. might do better.
I feel like there's been a fairly recent retcon of the new atheist movement to make it something more important and concrete than it really was. I honestly compartmentalize it in the same zone as furries - a small group of weirdos who maybe had more of a visible presence online in the early 2000s because the internet wasn't 'everyone' yet. I think the retcon allows some interesting arguments to be developed, but it just doesn't reflect the reality of the time - that 'loudly atheistic people' were an extremely marginal group in every sense.
Freddie, do you know about religious market theory? I'm an atheist much like you, but I think RMT is basically correct, and it predicts forthcoming revivals.
https://sociologytwynham.com/2018/05/02/religious-market-theory/
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520057319/the-future-of-religion
Still gets me every time. https://www.theonion.com/george-w-bush-debuts-new-paintings-of-dogs-friends-g-1819595637
When your Substack was introduced I was eager to subscribe but to be honest, your atheism posts were what I was looking forward to the least: everything I had read previously on subject had either been someone lamenting how hard it is living in a predominantly Christian country or some Maher/Dawkins-style smarm. I wasn’t eager for more.
Not that you need my praise, but as a practicing Catholic I found this piece original; it gave me things to think about and was all well-put. Thank you.