From about 2004-2008, it seemed like the political battle lines were being drawn around Christian fundamentalism and the (professed) moral standards of straight, white, suburban, and Republican attendees of America's mega-churches. Obviously this was largely because GW Bush was a born-again Christian, and he gave religion an even stronger national platform than usual. He even claimed to talk with God, folks. The Iraq War was his "crusade," Congress threw the brakes on everything to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case, and there was a widespread aversion to stem-cell research. Meanwhile, the anti-Bush libs fought on the culture-war terrain against religion, producing for example the book and documentary With God On Their Side (2004), the 2005 book American Theocracy, the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, the 2008 Bill Maher movie Religiulous, etc. I remember concern at the time over Congresspeople's apocalyptic beliefs that Israel must be protected for prophetic Biblical reasons. (This has re-emerged a little bit recently because of the genocide in Gaza).
After Bush left office, it seemed like this entire terrain of the culture war evaporated. No crazy fundamentalist in office, no concern over religiosity in America. So, I was wondering what this means in hindsight. Christian religious fundamentalism had its moment, but does that mean it only rose to prominence because annoying libs, media elites, and the chattering classes talked about it with respect to Bush? As in, they were snide about it, because haha, Bush is legitimately a dumb-ass? If so, where did the 2004-2008 left enter into this debate? Clearly they're not supporting Bush, so they must've linked arms with libs to say that the Moral Majority-flavor of Christianity was bad.
But: what characterizes the left's interpretation of religion now? Have Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Cenk Uygur, and Reddit Atheists made the criticism of religion irredeemably cringe? Does the left not care about religion anymore as one of the fronts in the "war of position" against the bourgeoisie? If so, is that because things like Occupy and Sanders' democratic socialism, which were nascent and unthinkable in 2004, steered lefty concerns towards a more material direction? Or, has the left viewed religion as incidental and co-optable in the struggle towards a classless society?
That's a lot of stray questions, but I had been thinking about this for awhile and wanted to get the random thoughts down.
My take is that the new atheist movement had a fundamental flaw in framing religion in too similar a manner as the religious themselves: that it was not a product of culture but rather an outside actor on culture. For the religious, it’s outside of culture because it comes from god and not man. For the new atheists, they tended to frame it as some nefarious cabal, the elite (although rarely elites in a class sense) injecting it into culture from the outside. Or, worse yet, talking about any religious belief as a sign of mental illness, like it could come from a defect. Smugness of this aside, the analysis of religion could never evolve beyond the logic facts and reasons arguments. Basically, if you’re going to evaluate why cultural movements happen from a materialist perspective, you’ve got to examine the material reasons for it.
And if you do that, it becomes apparent that religion is more so a tool to justify particular regimes or movements. Like, it’s prettily obvious that the shift from Christianity as the divine justification for feudalism, to modern day evangelicals saying the Bible supports free markets and individualism, is a case of the changes in material interests of the ruling class being the cause and the changes in religious attitudes the effect. Not just the ruling classes either, liberation theology shows that the downtrodden can use it to buttress their rallying cry for radical change. And the fact that so many new atheists became right wing grifters or weirdo “cultural Christians” showed that rejecting the religious element didn’t automatically mean a rejection of the regressive culture associated with it (anyone remember elevatorgate?).
On the flip side, the new atheist argument got weaker as well, as during the later Obama years and Trump presidency, there was a significant shift in the nature of the religious right. The old greatest generation evangelicals had a strict, god first country second, biblical literalism theology. It was very common for them to say that the U.S. is a fundamentally wicked, evil country. That generation is mostly dead now, and the new guard doesn’t care so much about biblical literalism, instead focusing on Christian nationalism. It’s a country first, god second approach, with the latter more a bludgeon to establish national supremacism rather that the central character. With that sort of argument, Christianity makes America the supreme culture, nitpicking about “askshully the way tides work in the Red Sea makes this passage from the Old Testament scientifically impossible” falls flat.