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Recently, I was approached with an invitation to have a dialogue on Justin Brierley\u2019s\u00a0Unbelievable?\u00a0<\/em>radio show with secular humanist James Croft, a Patheos neighbor on the non-religious network. Details are still being worked out, assuming Croft is game, but very broadly speaking, we have been invited to have a discussion of atheism and the alt-right: Is there a connection, and if so, what is its nature? As a rare evangelical humanist who has my ear to the ground on these things, I\u2019m grateful to have been sought out for my opinion. I have long thought it unfortunate that more Christians aren\u2019t speaking into this particular sphere. Since James has written at some length about it from his secular humanist perspective, I thought it only fair to take the opportunity to begin some engagement with his thoughts in writing.<\/p>\n In the first article I read<\/a> while getting caught up on James\u2019 work, James lays out a series of attributes that he believes have left the atheist movement vulnerable to alt-right propaganda. These include a lack of salient positive values, an unhealthy compulsion to break taboos, a tendency to develop intellectual superiority complexes, and a circling of the wagons around misogynistic men. James also believes that just as men who fall for alt-right propaganda are buying into a false victim narrative, so atheists have an unfortunate habit of constructing exaggerated victim narratives around themselves.<\/p>\n I confess that Croft\u2019s language of social justice and group identity is not my natural tongue. I prefer to view people as individuals. But I still found a number of his observations to be of sociological interest. I have observed many of these characteristics myself, particularly when engaging with atheists on social media. It\u2019s especially amusing to be on the receiving end of misogyny combined<\/em> with an intellectual superiority complex. (Not that I\u2019m wounded. I just want insecure atheist misogynists to feel they\u2019re doing well<\/a>.) Happily, this has not so much been my experience in the real world where people live and work and solve problems together instead of loudly shouting their most controversial opinions at each other. In person, my atheist friends and I typically have some other worthwhile task to be doing that makes our religion or lack thereof blessedly irrelevant.<\/p>\n I also share Croft\u2019s alarm at the rise of the alt-right. Trump\u2019s candidacy was an eye-opening experience for me in this respect. Too many conservative friends whose opinions I value failed to recognize the scope of the problem, dismissing it as \u201ca handful of trolls in their parents\u2019 basement,\u201d or \u201charmless joking.\u201d Croft discusses at some length how the alt-right has built its brand on trolling and meme culture, which has intersected with atheists\u2019 love of provocation as an end in itself. In this subculture, the discussion and weighing of ideas for their positive merit is replaced by \u201cwhatever will get a rise out of SJWs.\u201d<\/p>\n This can turn very ugly very fast, and it has gotten so wildly out of hand that people have been caught in the cross-hairs who don\u2019t even answer to the description of \u201cleftist SJW.\u201d Nobody perceived as a \u201ccuck\u201d or a \u201cbeta\u201d is safe, including conservatives who are perceived as insufficiently \u201cmanly\u201d (read: conservatives whose modus operandi<\/em> is principled argument versus tribalistic chest-thumping). I have over and over again pointed to the example of David French, who was attacked with an unimaginably vile alt-right social media campaign because of his adopted African daughter. If you have not read his Atlantic piece<\/a> about raising his daughter, which recaps some of this dark history, I encourage everyone to do so.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Croft\u2019s analysis is severely weakened by an extraordinary lack of fairness when it comes to certain prominent atheists who have been called an ideological \u201cgateway drug\u201d to the alt-right. Here, I find myself in the odd position of defending Sam Harris. Harris has come under fire from Croft in the past and is again lambasted here. Things like Sam\u2019s anti-Islam rhetoric and willingness to discuss IQ research that could reveal disparate impact on minorities seem to have put him beyond the pale for Croft. In his world, it seems Sam Harris is barely a hop and a skip away from Richard Spencer. This despite the fact that Harris has consistently opposed Trump and explicitly distanced himself from the alt-right. I have heard Harris say in so many words that the kind of people who ask questions about topics like race and IQ \u201cwith a gleam in their eye\u201d do not deserve the oxygen of publicity. But apparently, Croft needs more infallible proofs than these that Sam Harris is not a racist.<\/p>\n Jordan Peterson isn\u2019t mentioned in this post, but I doubt Croft would give him a fair shake either. I have to wonder how the Weinstein brothers would come out as well. Would he say Bret Weinstein and his wife deserved to be ostracized from the academy<\/a> because they didn\u2019t check the social agitation box of the day at Evergreen State? I won\u2019t presume to answer that on James\u2019 behalf, but it\u2019s something I invite him to consider carefully.<\/p>\n Anyway, while sociological analysis is fine, I am more interested in philosophical questions than sociological questions. And I think this question, \u201cIs there an atheist alt-right connection?\u201d invites some pretty interesting philosophical follow-ups.<\/p>\n First, to return to James\u2019 point about taboo-breaking, I would contend this is a function of the atheist conviction that nothing is sacred. I\u2019m old enough to remember P. Z. Myers\u2019s \u201cCrackergate,\u201d his 2008\u00a0adventures in consecrated host desecration.<\/a>\u00a0Myers took a perverse glee in publishing the subsequent Catholic outrage mail over \u201cthe cracker incident\u201d on his blog. I am reminded of nothing so much as the initiation of Mark Studdock in C. S. Lewis\u2019s\u00a0That Hideous Strength.\u00a0<\/em>In order to be admitted into the society of N. I. C. E., Mark must prove his mettle by trampling on a crucifix. He refuses. Why? Does he believe? No, he says. He\u2019s refusing\u00a0because it\u2019s all nonsense.\u00a0<\/em>Why is it so important that he trample on\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>thing? It\u2019s only a random bit of wood, after all. It should be no more meaningful to trample on it than to kiss it.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not only the body of Christ that is gleefully discarded as non-sacred in the atheist mind. It is our own bodies as well, which are most emphatically our own and most emphatically not bought with a price. Nothing we might dream up to do with them is too degrading. The kinkier, the better. Any new human bodies that might be accidentally formed along the way can be neatly disposed of in equally conscience-free fashion. And once we\u2019ve aborted the fetus, we might as well chuck it in a waste-to-energy incinerator as bury it. There is nothing intrinsically sacred about the human body, because there is nothing intrinsically sacred about anything.<\/p>\n Yet James believes he has something positive to fill the definitional void of atheism: humanism. To which I say: Good luck. But to quote Douglas Murray cleverly re-purposing Christopher Hitchens<\/a>, all the work still lies before you. As an openly gay atheist, Douglas hardly fits the job description of a Christian apologist. Nevertheless, he forcefully argues it is not at all self-evident that human life\u00a0<\/em>would\u00a0be sacred in an atheist world.<\/p>\n While James is, ironically, a vocal proponent of abortion rights, I presume he still wants to hold onto some form of human exceptionalism. I invite him to show me how this can be extracted from the process of natural selection. Richard Dawkins freely confesses in\u00a0The God Delusion\u00a0<\/em>that\u00a0he has no logical reason to consider himself any more \u201cspecial\u201d than his ape cousins. Peter Singer made the same argument when he refused to sign Humanist Manifesto III.<\/a> As far as he\u2019s concerned, the notion of human exceptionalism is no more than a speciesist holdover from Western society\u2019s dogmatic Christian phase. (As an aside, I note with some interest that unlike Dawkins, Hitchens was less than enamored of Singer while he was alive. In debate with John Lennox, a thought experiment comes up where Singer compared his daughter with his pet rat. Hitchens remarks that he had two thoughts when he read this: First, that he wouldn\u2019t want to be Singer\u2019s daughter, and second, that he wouldn\u2019t much like to be his pet rat either.)<\/p>\n This brings us back to the matter of race and IQ. James is fixated on the mere fact that people like Sam Harris and Charles Murray are having an open discussion of the data. The real problem is that the conversation is taking place in a society where mere membership of species homo sapiens<\/em> is no longer enough to confer worth or value. To go back to the other Murray, Douglas Murray, this point was made quite well in a conversation he had with Jordan Peterson<\/a>. Douglas says he has been getting progressively more and more questions about \u201cthe IQ question\u201d from the right wing, and it disturbs him because he fears what lies behind them. He fears a society where nothing is sacred. At minute 23, he puts a sharp point on his fears:<\/p>\n If the people who are most interested in it keep pushing it like this, I see some terrible concatenation of nightmares, because of course this isn\u2019t happening in a vacuum\u2026Let me put it this way: The concept of the sanctity of the individual, whether you define that in a religious context or in the kind of \u2018secular religious\u2019 context in which some of us currently hold this idea, the time at which the notion of the sanctity of the individual is sort of eroding in the society, the combination of that happening at the same time as an obsession with IQ in the century ahead of us just has the potential for a catastrophe of 20th-century proportions. And that\u2019s the reason why I just fear that if this isn\u2019t dealt with in a reasonable way, it comes at us in the most unreasonable way imaginable somewhere down the line.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n