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The Call for an Atheist Counterattack Against Christian Nationalism
Eastern Christianity and how conservative Christian politics is more threatening than fundamentalist theology
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks and during the clumsy imperialism of George W. Bush’s neoconservatives in their Iraq War, an atheist movement arose in the West and targeted the most virulent forms anachronistic religion, namely fundamentalism in Islam and Christianity.
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens engaged in numerous debates with religious apologists, and demonstrated the irrationality of literalistic theologies. Daniel Dennett explained how religion is a natural phenomenon that’s based on cognitive biases.
Rather than having an explicit agenda, this “New Atheist” movement asserted the superiority of liberal secular cultures, and reminded everyone why we should be glad that religious fundamentalism hasn’t held center stage in modern countries since the eighteenth century.
In any case, the New Atheist movement fragmented along political lines as social media technologies nevertheless tribalized those First World populations.
Then came the blight of Donald Trump’s presidency, his potential reelection, and what Freedom House shows is a two-decade-long systematic collapse of democracies and a loss of confidence in liberal values around the world. Consequently, there’s a call for a New New Atheism, as it were, for yet another reminder why only secular humanistic cultures have a chance of supporting honourable lifestyles in the face of scientific and technological advances.
This time, however, the target shouldn’t be the low-hanging fruit of religious fundamentalism. Instead, the Eastern Orthodox Church provides a model for American Christian nationalists who are poised to sabotage modern America’s institutions under the banner of Trump’s populism.
Unlike the Catholic Church, which the pope centrally controls from Rome, Eastern churches are “autocephalous,” so that they fall under the sway of local rulers.
As Britannica explains, “Several of the autocephalous churches are de facto national churches, the Russian church being by far the…
