This is personal for me, because I'm just old enough to have been active and around for that weird time in Dubya years when it finally started to become permissible, even cool, to call oneself atheist in at least some parts of the United States, especially on college campuses like the one I went to.
I kept in contact with scores of people that I had close ties with from the early 2000s, but watching the followers of the "Four Horsemen," as well as the horsemen themselves (fuck Sam Harris in particular, the quack hack), lead their flock in an increasingly reactionary direction was disturbing. Dawkins in particular had many swans to wrestle, especially against even the slightest attempts to make the movement about anything in particular other than dunking on religious people and feeling smart about it.
I saw the "dunk on fundies" video makers become "dunk on feminists and SJWs" almost overnight, around the time the Gamergate reactionary movement began.
To summarize though, it freaks me out how many of my old New Atheist college contacts started calling themselves "culturally Christian" (which means lots of tradwife craving and authoritarian and colonial aspirations, minus the inconvenient deity part) and even started becoming subscribers to Jordan Peterson.
Wild ride, buckos. :agony-yehaw:
On that note, I'd like make an observation as someone who's not a cis anglo saxon. I wasn't raised Christian and so I'm pretty much ignorant of that entire world, so please bear with me. I've always been atheist but I always saw an incredibly aggressive and vile undercurrent of hate within the 'New Atheist' movement and it's lead me to realize that I've met way more tolerant religious people in the US than I have met nonshit-head 'fundamental' atheists/agnostics. I think the Atheist movement in the country is way past the point of being a sort of revolt against oppression coming from religious entities in the country. The New Atheists were a reaction to something else, and I can't quite put my finger on it.
I just genuinely trust religious people more to not be complete pieces of shit with regards to class, gender, and race. Maybe I'm crazy and don't know enough about the world.
I've always seen the New Atheists as a kind of very thin intellectual cover to spread Islamophobia. It wasn't a reaction to something oppressive so much as a lurching, malformed twisted response to 9/11 as a way to get the fundamentalist Christians and the more cosmopolitan liberal types in the same side. New Atheism was the by product. They spent so much focus on Christianity because that's who they were around, but their main focus of hatred was always Islam. Now so many of these same people are overt reactionaries I'd say the intellectual cover worked well. It did what it was supposed to do.
Also there is genuine oppression perpetrated by religious groups in the USA, largely cults and evangelical groups brainwashing LGBTQ kids or destroying their lives. You'll notice that was hardly ever the focus for the new atheist currents. They were more focused on wacky creationists or justifying imperialist invasions.
I grew up Catholic down in Texas, so I was in a bit of a weird place. I don't know that I'd say I would trust religious people more. But there's definitely a generational gap in the attitudes of religious Boomers and religious Millennials. Cultural conservatism is a hell of a drug, but once you kick that habit you just end up with normal people who have a few eclectic superstitions and beliefs.
That's been my more recent experience, too.
Yeah, there's some horrible evangelical fundies that turned faith into a hate-driven MLM, but a lot of religious people use religion as a basis for having at least SOME kind of an ethos. I can't say the same for the cut adrift lazy hedonists I used to know from college who just did a lot of drugs, had an existential crisis or psychotic break, then crawled toward anyone offering them greater purpose than the emptiness they then felt, and generally that new moral compass was Jordan Peterson or someone like him.