I probably should have made this post back in October of last year, back when the thing I’m commenting on actually happened, but better late than never.
For those people lucky enough to have never heard of Richard Spencer before now, Richard Spencer is a US-American white nationalist. In the mid to late 2010s, he was considered the face of the “alt-right” political movement. Despite this, he has little actual political influence outside of the internet.
In October 2023, he came out with this Twitter post:
New Atheism—as cringe as the movement got—came at the right time and had a major impact.
Dawkins’ God Delusion was published in 2006: right smack dab after Dubya’s reelection and the triumph of the “moral majority”—and just before the reality of the failure in Iraq set in and Bush’s rhetoric about America being chosen by God to fulfill his Democratic plan became hallow and risible.
Paleoconservatives—who also opposed Bush—had ZERO impact in their attacks against the neocons. On the other hand, nerdy, fedora-wearing atheists did create social change. While paleos blamed the neocons (implicitly, “the Jews”), New Atheists recognized that the fundamental problem was Abrahamism in general and fanatical Muslims, Zionsits, and evangelicals in particular: the obsession with the Holy Land, the quest to redeem the world, the demonization of their enemies as wicked and deserving of annihilation, etc. Every Abrahamic religion is exoterically pacifist; esoterically, its messaging undergirds global war at an unprecedented scale.
All this leads me to the conclusion:
WE MUST DO NEW ATHEISM AGAIN!
The scientific argument about god is settled and now boring. New, New Atheism should focus on the emerging field of “mythicism.” NNA should not pat itself on the back for proving that the existence of a god is highly improbably. Instead, it should focus on what kind of messaging exists in the Tanakh, New Testament, and Koran that leads their flocks to End Time fantasies and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Richard Spencer. Twitter, 11 Oct. 2023.
Since I do not use Twitter myself, I only found out about this tweet well after he made it. Hence why I’m only posting about it months later.
Why am I making this post? My first reason to record the fact that a semi-famous person did indeed say this, since I don’t know how many other people have reported on this tweet. But my second reason is to highlight how Spencer seems to be ignorant of both the New Atheist movement and of religious studies more generally. Some noteworthy things to point out are:
- New Atheism was not anti-war or critical of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. On the contrary, people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris were quite open about their support for Bush’s military intervention in the Middle East. Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Slate called “Bush’s Secularist Triumph” (9 Nov. 2004), where he praises Bush for his invasion of Iraq. Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith (2005), called for using torture on suspected terrorists (p. 194), seemingly focusing on Muslim terrorists.
There were (and still are) a bunch of millenarian religious war hawks in the US government who think they’re fulfilling Biblical “end times” prophecy. But, insofar as foreign policy was concerned, the heads of New Atheism were on the war hawks’ side. - If by “mythicism” Spencer means Jesus mythicism, then mythicism is far from an “emerging field.” Arthur Drews published The Christ Myth back in 1909. Interestingly, Drews’ work on Jesus mythicism was strongly promoted in the early Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin (see the article “The Mythic Buglakov” [1999] by Edith C. Haber for more info). That said, the Soviets realized that shilling Jesus mythicism was a lost cause sometime before the 1980s. We’ll see how long it takes for the alt-right to reach the same conclusion.
- The “End Times fantasies” that Spencer thinks are in the New Testament are relatively recent developments. They mostly come from dispensational premillennialism, a theology that emerged in the 19th century.
If Christianity were only “exoterically pacifist; esoterically, its messaging undergirds global war at an unprecedented scale,” then perhaps we would expect this “esoteric” Christianity to have emerged before the 19th century; perhaps we could find “End Times” charts, depicting a global war involving a Jewish state, in the works of the Church Fathers or Medieval mystics. But do we?
On that last point, if Spencer wants to “focus on what kind of messaging exists in the […] New Testament,” then below I will present a couple starting points:
But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.
Matthew 24.36 (ESV).
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.
II Thessalonians 2.1-2 (ESV).
Nikaea 325 