New Atheism disappeared, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex recently wrote in a typically provocative and long blog post, because New Atheists became progressives.

Religion had initially served as an answer for why half of America insisted on voting Republican, but as the liberal coalition began to contain “too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans,” faith became an unattractive explanation and was replaced by “sexism and racism.” Suddenly, the defining feature of GOP voters wasn’t a faith-based approach to politics, according to this analysis, but holding to views on gender and race that progressives found deplorable.

In concert with this shift from the GOP is the party of the religious to the GOP is the party of the bigots, Alexander maintains that a corresponding shift took place in which New Atheists (whose dominant frame is anti-God) became progressives (whose dominant frame is anti-bigotry).

That might be true for some. (PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog comes to mind.) But it’s at best an incomplete explanation. Sure, Alexander admits that “atheists are heavily affiliated with the modern anti-social justice movement,” like Sam Harris, Peter Boghossian, Michael Shermer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the ghost of Christopher Hitchens. But:

That’s because the only people remaining in the atheist movement are the people who didn’t participate in the mass transformation into social justice. It is no contradiction to say both “Most of the pagans you see around these days are really opposed to Christianity” and “What ever happened to all the pagans there used to be? They all became Christian.”

But this ignores the fact that “anti-SJW” atheists have lost interest in the argument as well. The comparison with paganism would only make sense if pagans had split into rival religious factions, as New Atheists did following “elevatorgate.”

The particulars of this scandal are too preposterous not to explain in detail: In July 2011, a man followed the progressive atheist blogger Rebecca Watson into a hotel elevator late at night after a conference and invited her back to his room for coffee. Watson said in a video that such behavior “creeps her out” and then discussed the video and some hostile responses at a later conference. The left-wing PZ Myers wrote in support, and none other than Richard Dawkins appeared in the comments. “Dear Muslima,” he wrote, addressing a facetious post which compared the genital mutilation and honor killings experienced in the Islamic world with the somewhat overbearing behavior endured by Watson.

Dawkins would apologize some years later, but a fuse had been lit on the powder keg of political contradictions at the heart of the New Atheist movement. The progressives, as Alexander says, realized that racial, sexual, and gender inequality flowed from more than monotheistic faith. The anti-progressives, meanwhile, realized that censorious, moralistic, and utopian values could be secular as well as religious.

What followed was far less of a debate than an online flamewar. The philosopher Richard Carrier rather grandly told fellow progressive atheists that it was time to “cut free the dead weight so we can kick the C.H.U.D.s back into the sewers and finally disown them, once and for all.” The anti-progressives, meanwhile, gathered in places like the infamous Slymepit forum, which hosted the kind of anti-feminist trolling that would get mainstream attention during “GamerGate” and was the birthplace of the comedy character Godfrey Elfwick.

Of course, the biggest names in atheism avoided dirtying their hands by getting involved in these online antics. But a rift had been created. PZ Myers began to talk about transphobia more than the Trinity, and Sam Harris began to discuss campus censorship more than Christianity.

Above all, New Atheism had been an excuse for an argument. New atheists liked conflict and enjoyed being iconoclastic. How many times can you have debates about the existence of God, though? It was getting stale, and audiences — as Alexander shows with reference to copious graphs — were losing interest. More than that, however, they were pushing on an open door. Christians had far less cultural power than had been presumed, and atheists were met, in general, with more polite requests for debates than outraged cries for censorship or social sanction.

For a while it was fun to vex Dinesh D’Souza, middle-aged ladies from Texas, and YouTube nerds with names like “VenomFangX.” But I think the New Atheists turned a corner when Christopher Hitchens died and was mourned with reverence owed to a saint. Expecting to be rebels, atheists found that their truth claims were all but uncontroversial. They moved on to more intense arenas of rhetorical dispute, and people who banged on about the existence of God looked increasingly monomaniacal, irrelevant, and dull.

I think the New Atheists receive both too much and too little credit. Consider a recent tweet sent out by Bret Weinstein, a biologist associated with the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God.” Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

He was missing an awful lot, actually. He was missing the fact that, by this logic, atheists should “quit broadcasting” the “exclusionary claim” that there is no God, given the “brutal coercion of people” in the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror in Spain, the Cultural Revolution, and so on.

But he was also missing the fact that if Christians stopped maintaining that Jesus is the son of God, they would not be Christians.

For a while I was one of those people who thought New Atheists failed to appreciate the significance of religiously-inspired rituals, literature, music, art, and so on. I guess I still do. But as long as people reject their truth, those things will disappear into history. They will become museum exhibits and half-remembered myths, like the glories of Ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome.

The greatest enemies of religious believers are not, then, atheists who reject the idea of God’s existence, but apatheists who don’t consider the subject relevant.

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to the latter. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand their terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”) There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying:

…the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is it unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest no answers have been offered. How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logic conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance—as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga brilliantly skewered Dawkins here on this very point—they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of an Edward Feser or a John Haldane. True enough. But if I’m on the street and ask the average believer in evolution by natural selection to explain it and declare Darwin refuted because monkeys did not turn into men, am I being scientifically honest? No, not really.

Still, for all their errors, the New Atheists were right that certain matters raise questions that demand a serious attempt to resolve. Does God exist? Does life have objective significance or does it not? Is there an objective moral code or is there not? Is there an afterlife?

These are not questions we as individuals or societies can sidestep. A principled inquiry into these kinds of things may catch fewer eyes than a tribally-sorted debate about, say, gender differences or free speech on Youtube. But this is no failing for the people who insist on having the argument anyway. Richard Dawkins may be wrong about many things, but he was right about that. R.I.P. New Atheism.