Thanks for your response to my story Benjamin. I’ll write a more thorough reply in a separate article, but for now allow me to reassure you that I’m not blaming atheism for America’s descent into neo-pagan tribalism.

I’m an atheist myself, so I don’t think atheism is the problem and I certainly don’t think atheists “believe in nothing.” (I wrote an article a long while back called “A Different Kind of God Debate” or something to that effect, explaining why I think that atheists like myself often have more faith than theists.)

I also don’t think it was atheism or humanism that caused Europe to become more egalitarian. I’m pretty sure I said it was the other way round.

I’ll have to develop this at greater length later, but briefly I think that the decline of American religion is of a piece with the decline of community organizations in general (discussed in books like “Bowling Alone”). That process was accelerated by the rise of the internet, with a generational shift owing to people spending more of their lives online, and further exacerbated by the pandemic.