To explain how I became a New Atheist is easy. To explain why I am no longer a New Atheist is harder. The story will make more sense if I do a quick rundown of how my views on religion changed over time.

Curiously enough, my views on religion have largely traced the path that the public perception of Christianity has taken in Europe, for the past several hundred years.

I grew up as a cultural Catholic. My family attended the Liturgy, and my parents were interested in me getting a religious instruction, but I was largely indifferent to it. Towards the end of this period, I was viewed traditional religious practice as something obsolete and naive, and was more interested in ancient Greek philosophy and conspiracy theories.

Then, around the age of 16, I became acquainted with Protestant thought, by interacting with Protestants online on IRC and various forums. The particular strain of Protestantism that captured me was very much against organized religion, pretending to represent the True Faith™, which was corrupted by the evil Church. It seemed very obvious to me at the time that none of the churches really represented what Jesus preached. I believed that True Faith™ could only be achieved individually. I read and highlighted the New Testament with a green marker, and spent a lot of time in online forums arguing my case.

This period lasted for about two or three years, but my interest in science got me swept up in the skeptical movement. I eventually got embarrassed about the fact that I used to tacitly accept the validity of various forms of popular superstitions, as well as conspiracy theories, so I made it my mission to become a debunker and an expert in logical fallacies.

Going down this rabbit hole eventually created a conflict between my immature religious faith and what I was eagerly learning about reason, science, and evidence. I still very clearly remember the moment when I told to myself that “there’s no God”. At the time it felt like a liberation from lies I had been telling myself, which was true, because my understanding of God was very rudimentary and pagan in nature.

The days and weeks that followed went through went in a daze. I saw everything in a new light, I looked at random people in the street and on the bus in astonishment, amazed at how they just took “that religious stuff” for granted, when it was so obvious to me now that it was false.

This happened around 2004, right around the time when New Atheism was picking up momentum. I became acquainted with it, I eagerly absorbed everything that came from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, et al., and I felt like I was part of something momentous, something true. Religion was doing down, and I was going to be part of this. I joined the (now defunct) Richard Dawkins Forums. I joined atheist groups on Yahoo! and Myspace. I followed the Rational Response Squad, and was excited when an anonymous donor rented a house for them. Rook Hawkins, their resident historian, finally had the space to prove that Jesus didn’t even exist! I followed the Beyond Belief conference in 2006. I followed The Amazing Atheist, Brett Keane, and other YouTube atheists. I read Pharyngula. I ranted online against religion and for what I believed were “Enlightenment values”. I shared memes mocking religion. I had the links to prove that “Hitler was a Christian”. I got in all the nitpicking debates that are the norm in this bubble, such as “is atheism the right word for us?“ , “is «disbelief» the same thing as «lack of belief»?”, and other such arcane topics. I debated creationists. I felt like unless we fight religion and superstition, we will fall into an abyss of obscurantism which always lurks right around the corner.

At this point, I was certain that I would never change my point of view. How could I? I felt so certain I was in the right spot! Everything made sense, the arguments all pointed to what I was doing at the time. How could I ever change my mind about something this obviously true?

I get to the year 2011 and I begin to get tired of the atheist community. Previously I had felt like I was part of something special: smart and rational people making grand plans for the future. But many years passed, and it didn’t seem like we were going anywhere. More and more people were joining the trend, and the quality of the discussions went down the drain drastically. Discussions which we had refined over years, and settled with subtle conclusions, were now being rehashed with the elegance of a hippo in a china shop. People weren’t interested in subtleties, they just wanted to smash religion and mock everything sacred. Trying to educate them to “our level” felt like the labors of Sisyphus.

I began to get interested in other stuff, such as history, and especially the horrors of the 20th century. Reading about Communist Atheism was often uncomfortable, as I despised Communism, and I felt awkward reading their take on religion, which had similarities to my radical atheist days.

Everything changed around 2015. I clearly remember spending my first Christmas after many years, in December 2014, simply enjoying the holidays with my family, without feeling the need to contemplate how stupid and pointless religion was.

On January 7 2015, radical Islamic terrorists shot up the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris. My visceral reaction was to sympathize with the victims, not merely because they had died horribly, but also because they were fellow Westerners. I felt like “my people” got slaughtered.

It came as a shock to me to discover a great divide in the “secular community”. While some took the same position I did, others thought we were being bigoted. Why did we care about the Paris victims, we were told, but said nothing about the victims who died in a blast in Afghanistan? It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Of course I feel bad for the people who died in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan isn’t “home”. Not in the same way that Paris is. I’ve never visited Paris, but I’ve always considered myself a Westerner. An attack on Paris was an attack on one of “our capitals”.

All of a sudden I felt alienated from the “secular community”, which just one day before I had considered my ingroup. My Western identity beat my atheist/skeptic identity. I began to drift away from the progressive side of the secular community, and to hang out more with secular conservatives. Here I stumbled upon videos, articles, and books by people like Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, and others, who I greatly respected and who shocked me by saying good things about Christianity. “Wait”, the atheist voice in my head said, “isn’t Christianity obsolete and on its way out? Why are these cool people praising it and suggesting that the future of our civilization may depend on it?”.

At this point, I settled on the label “secular conservative”, and had no intention of giving Christianity the benefit of the doubt. I still hung on to a victim narrative from my militant atheist days, which made me see myself as part of an oppressed group that Christians were oppressing.

Milo’s interview on the Rubin Report where they discuss Atheism, made me face the fact that my oppression narrative was largely grievance mongering. Is it not a fact that almost everyone notable in Silicon Valley, the media, and Hollywood is irreligious, and atheists have some of the most celebrated public intellectuals on their side? Realizing this gave me pause, as playing the victim was one of the pillars of my New Atheist identity.

The Trump candidacy of 2016 was also a stepping stone. I was simply dismayed by the mass hysteria that took over the community I had previously considered to be the pinnacle of human progress and rationality. Here were the same people who I used to revere: scientists, philosophers, and skeptics, falling for the most ridiculous clickbait headlines, and going into nervous breakdowns on Twitter.

I began to notice a pernicious bias in my former tribesmen, the “secular community”. Whenever Christianity came up, it was always dismissed as obviously stupid and condemned as obviously evil. Religion in the abstract was considered to be a problem, and Christianity was just one religion among many. Meanwhile, the more vocal progressive “influencers” which showed up in my newsfeed started to develop a subtle favoritism towards Islam. Sure, you could dismiss Christianity, but saying bad things about Islam made you an uncultured bigot. Islam was exotic and misunderstood, while Christianity was ridiculous, shameful, and obsolete.

The standard position in the “secular community” is that civilization began with the Enlightenment. Everything before that was savagery, something we should constantly belittle and despise.

Looking back, I now see how destructive the secular world’s implicit disdain for Christianity is. You can’t maintain a coherent political body based on vilifying most of your history. It creates a rupture between those who consider themselves a distinct tribe, the secularists, who begin to view the Christian part of our past and present as an “other” which has to be removed.

That view was challenged after going down a rabbit hole. It started with the article “The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews “God’s Philosophers”” and continued with some of the books referenced there. Turns out, our Western culture is infused with a dark legend, a conspiracy theory about “the evil Church which persecuted stood in the way of scientific progress”. The “conflict thesis”, as it is called, while relying on and reframing certain historical events (always the same: Galileo and a few others), is based far more on ignoring the long-running fruitful relationship between Christianity and the development of philosophy and science.

Nassim Taleb’s description of religion as a decision-making tool, Richard Feynman’s positive comments on Christianity in his book, “The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist”, the Franciscan University video on “Myths About the Crusades”, and the BBC documentary on “The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition” pretty much dispelled any preconceived ideas I had about the value and history of Christianity. I also read “Religion for Atheists” by Alain de Botton.

With my “mental block” now gone, I was free and open to identifying with Christianity as a cultural artifact and a lived practice, with Christendom as a civilization, and in particular with the faith of my upbringing, Catholicism.

The first effect of my outlook on Christianity changing has to do with my perception of what I considered “my people”. It expanded to also include the persecuted Christians throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The more I read about their plight, and about how their religious tradition is related to the one from my childhood upbringing, the more I began to identify with them. Christianity was no longer just “a religion”, it was “our religion”.

I vividly remember entering a Catholic church, looking at the paintings with new eyes, awkwardly trying to remember one of the childhood prayers and performing the sign of the cross.

I read a book by Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, whose Papacy I had mocked in my militant atheist days. The only thing I knew about him at the time were the memes comparing him to Darth Sidious, the Sith Lord from Star Wars. But I discovered an extremely cultured and intellectually gifted man. The exact opposite of the caricature of devoted Christians I previously held.

Notice that so far, I’ve only mentioned identitarian shifts and aesthetic appreciations. This is important, because when I was a militant atheist I always reduced religion to the articulated belief in the existence of the supernatural. I always believed that in order to reconsider religion, I’d first need some sort of empirical proof of the existence of the supernatural.

One thing I noticed after being on both sides of an identity, even finding myself on the same side twice, was that it was never about the arguments, reason, and evidence. Not really. What it was really about was a pre-rational decision to identify with one group or another, which was then rationalized by invoking “arguments”.

I first left my original, cultural Christianity only once I was convinced through my interaction with the Protestant sources, that it was corrupt, and that I was now part of the True Faith™.

I left my Protestant identity behind once I was convinced, through my interaction with the Skeptical community, that I was now with the brightest group ever.

I left my atheist/skeptical identity behind once I was convinced, through my disappointment with it, that it was cringe.

I always derived satisfaction from being part of “the right group”. I didn’t change my allegiance because of new evidence. Rather, I simply felt drawn to the next social circle, while feeling repulsed by the previous one. I derived meaning from being with “the right people”, doing “the right thing”. Evidence, reason, and any reasons in general, were merely exploited and selected in order to match that end.

At every step, I always gave generous interpretations to those who I considered “my tribe”, and was overly critical and dismissive of those who were part of a “hostile tribe”. I still do this, and I believe it is the default state in which we function (for evolutionary reasons).

I don’t despise my previous iterations, my former identities, although I do regret the time lost.

The important lesson for me was that no matter how sure I may feel about something, and no matter how convincing the arguments may sound, I can simply find myself framing it another way tomorrow, if the right context makes me do it. A change that looks impossible today can become reality just one day away.

This presents a very difficult question. If nothing is set in stone, and everything can change tomorrow, why should we even subscribe to anything?

My answer is that we really don’t have any choice. At any moment, we’re bound to subscribe to something. Even subscribing to apathy is still something. But my body drives me to strive, to take part in something. I can’t help it, I just experience it.

So for now I will stick with exploring Christianity. I’m attending Liturgy, and I’ve memorized the main prayers, both in vernacular and in Latin. I listen to liturgical music on YouTube, both Western, Eastern, and classical. I’ve let myself drift into it, picking it up as I go along.

I don’t yet have the answers and the “proofs” I demanded when I was a militant atheist. I honestly don’t know what to say about the supernatural aspects at this point. I have a reading list I intend to explore, including books by Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart, which promise to deliver a richer understanding than my original one. But what I’ve discovered in the history, tradition, aesthetics, humanity, and experience of it all is more intriguing than I could ever have guessed. And I’ve learned to be humble about what to expect and demand from the future. I’ve been caught by surprise far too many times.